How To Sell More Book Compilations On Amazon

If you are an author who writes long series, you are probably familiar with the principle of combining several books from that series into a compilation. If you have several such volumes, there is a mostly unknown way to sell more of them.

Books that are part of a series are easier to sell on Amazon than single books. There are several reasons for this.

First, serial readers are among the most active book buyers. They need constant replenishment and read all the books in a series if they liked the first book and are not disappointed by the next ones.

Second, Amazon offers us, authors, the opportunity to present all books of a series on a common series page. This gives each individual book an additional showcase in which it can be seen.

Third, under each book in a series, all other books in the same series appear directly on the book’s product page. So a reader who finds one of these books by searching the shop will always see all the associated books at once.

Why should I create compilations?

At some point, the older books in a series no longer sell themselves. As soon as a book is no longer listed among the new publications, its descent in the rankings begins. If you don’t do something about it, it soon becomes completely invisible. Only among the newer books in your series will it still be seen if you use the series function of Amazon.

Publishing a collection of books is smart in many ways.

A compilation is a new publication, even if all the books it contains are old. This way, your old books make it into the new releases and can be discovered by customers who have never seen your old books before.

You can also sell collections at a higher price than individual books. Your profit per sold copy increases also.

A higher profit per sold unit allows you to have a higher advertising budget. If you make a profit of, say, four dollars per volume sold, you can invest up to four dollars in each new buyer you win with Facebook Ads or Amazon Ads.

For a single book that only makes you a profit of maybe a dollar, you can invest correspondingly less.

So a collection will give you visibility in the new publications, even if you haven’t finished a new book yet. It gives you higher profits per sale, and you can invest more in advertising and still make a profit.

The only problem with collections is that your loyal fans won’t buy them because they already know the books they contain. Your newsletter is therefore eliminated as an advertising medium.

That’s why compilations will never enter the charts as high as a new book would. You should consider this so that you don’t get your hopes up too high.

How many books should a collection contain?

It depends on how many Volumes your series has. I know authors who always put the last two books together into a collection. For my taste, this is too little, even if it seems to work for some authors.

I have put my series of sixteen Volumes into two compilations.

For the method I describe in this article, it is, in any case, necessary to have at least two anthologies of a series.

How to generate more sales of your anthologies

The individual books of your series are already combined into a series. Unfortunately, you cannot add the anthologies to this existing series, because that would confuse your readers. Do you, therefore, have to do without the advantages of the series feature in your anthologies?

No, because that is precisely what my method is all about.

If you have at least two collections to your series, you can make your own series from these collections.

When you upload Volume one to Amazon, just fill out the field that asks for a series and give your new series a name.

For example, you can call it “The Great Thriller Compilation by Author XY” and say that this book is Volume one of the series.

Then you upload the second volume and fill in the series fields as well. For the Series title, enter the same as for Volume one.

Amazon will now take up to three days to create the new series title. Once that is done, you can start advertising.

Every customer you send to the product page of volume, one of your anthology series, will also see Volume two.

So you have two new books and only have to advertise one of them. The second book will automatically sell with it. Why? Because anyone who buys the first half of your series as a compilation will want the second half as well.

Does that really work?

I’ve tried it, and it works for me. My two volumes have been on the market for a month, and Volume two has only sold one less than Volume one.

So almost everybody who bought volume one bought Volume two. And Volume two always sells the same day, not a few days later. So the buyers always decide immediately to buy the whole series without having read the first half first.

The only ads I do are Amazon Ads for Volume one. The return on investment is so good that I could easily spend a lot more for each click and still make a good profit.

I will try to do that in the next days. Once I have identified the best keywords, I will increase my advertising budget.

Summary

1. you have a long book series

2. you make at least two compilations from this book series

3. you also make a series from the collections.

4. you advertise Volume One and automatically sell Volume Two with it.

I hope I could give you a good tip again on how to get more out of your portfolio and earn more money with it.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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