Thursday 5 April 2018

Boxed sets

Hi, my name is AMG and I’m addicted to boxed sets.
Hi, AMG. *bored AA response voice*
I adore a bargain.
My brain sees a box of books as a better deal than a single title. I think… maybe they could be good? Honestly, I don’t get how my own brain works some days.
I’ve bought box sets for one title. Or one author. Or just because they seem like a good deal.
So my kindle is full of them. I’ll admit there are some dodgy ones. Bad writing, bad formatting, bad covers… no hot linked table of contents. Believe me that is a sin of the first order.
They aren’t easy things to organise as an author in the Amazon world. The reader might pay 99cents for their six, eight, ten books but Amazon cannot credit multiple authors separately for their share of that 99cents.
So one author has to take responsibility for the payment and the distribution of that royalty earning and that has historically not gone well.
It can get ugly fast. There have been disastrous boxed sets that kept breaking the Amazon 5,000 page limit. There have been attempts to milk the Kindle Unlimited page read count with overlarge titles. And there have been copyright issues once a box is published with another author’s name on it.
But for me, the ugliest thing has been my inability to know what I own. I kept buying books I already owned. This is the opposite of a bargain.
So, I ‘tidied’ up my Scrivener Goodreads file. I made a folder for boxed sets and I added in every single boxed set I owned; with a separate scrivener link to the actual review when I read each title. I review each title separately. [Why should a good book get sucked down for being in a bad boxed set?]
They are metadata marked as amazon, kobo, audible, library and so on… it’s super easy to search scrivener; easier than the kindle app. And I counted how many in each set I had read, and marked the completed sets as ‘read’.
Bless me, I got ORGANISED.
It took me days.
You want to know how many… right?
238 boxed sets.
*face plants into keyboard*
It’ll take me years to read ‘em.
YEARS.
*stares straight into the camera*
Bring it.