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If you’re curating (aka organizing) a story bundle, how you select authors to invite to participate is entirely up to you. You can publish a call for submissions, or invite only authors whose names begin with the letter M, or who were born under a full moon – anything is fair game.

If you don’t have a firm plan, here are some things you might consider when deciding who to invite.

Quality

A bundle is essentially a box set where each participating author provides a cover, formatted ebook, sales copy, and a short biography. Not only should you consider the quality of an author’s writing, you’re also relying on them to provide a good cover and a well-formatted story. The curator will often not see the finished ebook until launch, and that’s not really a great time to realize an author forgot to add a copyright page, or has an unprofessional-looking cover. So when you’re considering who to invite, it’s worth checking out their existing covers and verifying that they know how to format ebooks.

Not only is this important for you as the curator, it’s also important because you should be considerate and respectful of the other authors who are participating in the bundle. They’re trusting that you will ensure their stories are in a collection they can be proud of.

A related consideration is whether or not an author has indie-published previously. If not, you may need to help them find someone to format their ebook and/or design their cover, or else help them yourself. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this – there are many talented authors out there who don’t know the difference between an epub and a mobi. But helping someone else may take more of your time, so make sure you feel comfortable with what you’re committing to.

Note that there are different types of bundles, so what you need from an author may change depending on the bundle and the site you’re going through. For example, BundleRabbit will soon be offering a collaboration feature, so the considerations with that will differ because the authors will coordinate on their own to create the ebook and cover.

Promotion

Do you, as the curator, want to handle all of the marketing? Or do you want the participating authors to help out?

Generally a bundle’s authors do things like post about the bundle on Facebook or Twitter, announce it in their newsletters, and/or write about it on their blogs. If you’re inviting an author who you know won’t do much, if any, promotion, are you doing so because they have a name/following that will help draw in readers? Because their writing is so good you don’t care if they promote the bundle? Because this is a friend, or an author you admire, and you want them to participate just because it makes you happy?

All of these situations are fine – just make sure you’ve thought through your reasons ahead of time. For example, if you plan to do the bulk of the bundle’s marketing on Facebook, and are expecting the authors to help out, it might not make sense to invite an author who doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Theme

Do you want to invite authors based on their writing ability, or on whether or not they have already published stories that fit the bundle’s theme – or both?

Suppose you’re curating an urban fantasy bundle. You might want to invite authors who already have multiple novels published in that genre in the hope that the bundle will appeal to the authors’ established fan bases. Or you might invite all the successful urban fantasy authors you know, then open the remaining slots up to people who you know will be able to write high quality stories that fit the theme. And, of course, you can just ask whoever you want regardless of what they’ve written and/or published in the past. 🙂 The key is to make sure you know what you’re doing and why.

However you choose to select who to invite to participate, it’s important to remember that a bundle is always a team effort to some degree. So whatever factors are important to you should be considered up front, not after you’ve invited someone and then realized they’re not a good fit.

Think through what’s important to you early on, and you – and the authors – will be happier with the end result.

Why should your personal Facebook profile contain your author information?

If you’re like most authors, you’ve probably used your personal Facebook profile to join writing-related groups, ‘liked’ Facebook pages that relate to a topic you write about, and so on. These groups and pages almost certainly contain members/followers who aren’t connected to you personally, so those people can only see things in your profile that you’ve made publicly available. That’s great, but it falls down if you want people to be able to find, say, your author website.

As a real-world example, about six months ago I was looking for authors to participate in a ghost-themed story bundle. I know plenty of talented people who could write great ghost stories, but I decided it would be fun to find a few new writers to work with who regularly write ghost stories, like Mark Leslie. I wandered through the various Facebook groups I’m in, found a few authors who sounded like they might fit the bill, and then went to look them up. Most of them either didn’t have links to their author websites on their personal profiles. I was able to find a few of them by googling, but not all, and after a while it got to be too time-consuming to try to track people down. I’m sure I missed a few authors who would have been perfect.

For the record, when I went to look at my own profile I discovered my author website was not visible to people who weren’t already connected to me. 🙂 But it is now!

How do you make author information on your personal profile public?

Here’s how to set your author website and social media links publicly available in your personal Facebook profile.

• Go to your personal Facebook profile.
• Click the ‘About’ button below your cover photo.
• Click on ‘Contact and Basic Info.’
• Make your website public.
  • Hover over ‘Websites’ in the ‘Websites and Social Links’ section. An ‘Edit’ button will appear to the right of this line. Click it.
  • Enter the URL to your website, if you haven’t already. Note that you can list multiple websites – for example, you might write under multiple pen names, and have one site for each.
  • Set the visibility to ‘Public’ by using the dropdown link.
    
  • Click ‘Save Changes.’
• Make your social media links public.
  • Hover over ‘Social Links’ in the ‘Websites and Social Links’ section. An ‘Edit’ button will appear to the right of this line. Click it.
  • Enter whatever social media links you want to add. Keep in mind that the visibility setting will apply to all of them.
  • Set the visibility to ‘Public’ by using the dropdown link.
    
  • Click ‘Save Changes.’

You can verify that this worked by viewing what your profile looks like to the public (i.e. anyone, even people who are not connected to you).

• Click the 3 dots to the right of ‘View Activity Log,’ which is on the bottom right side of your cover photo.
• In the dropdown that pops up, click ‘View As.’
• Click on ‘About,’ and verify that the information you specified as public is displayed.

A story bundle is an ebook box set that has a few characteristics that make it different from standard ebook box sets.

The main story bundling websites right now are BundleRabbit, StoryBundle, and Humble Bundle. StoryBundle and BundleRabbit only bundle books; Humble Bundle also bundles games.

Availability

Bundles can be purchased through a bundling website and, depending on how that site works, may also be available through online stores like Amazon, iBooks, etc.

Most bundles are available for a limited time only – for example, a bundle might be available for three weeks, and then it’s gone forever. Availability is determined by the rules of the bundling site, and by the duration the curator sets.

For example, The Escapist Bundle is currently available on Storybundle, but only for another eighteen days. The Witches’ Brew bundle is available on BundleRabbit, Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble, and at present there is no set end date for this collection.

How does one create a bundle?

The person who organizes a bundle is referred to as the curator. For StoryBundle and Humble Bundle, someone wanting to curate a bundle should contact the site; for BundleRabbit, anyone can create an account and put together a bundle.

The curator determines the theme, invites authors to participate, writes the sales copy, handles creation of marketing images if needed, sets the price, determines the duration of the bundle, decides if a portion of the sale price can be donated to charity, etc.

How can an author participate in a bundle?

If you know someone who is or will be curating a bundle, you can request to participate. Or you might suggest another author create a bundle, and offer one of your stories (this approach has the added advantage of you not having to do the organizational work…).

BundleRabbit is unique in that authors can upload stories they’d like to have in bundles; curators can search the available content and extend invitations to authors through the website.

How does the revenue split work?

The bundling site will take a percentage of the proceeds after taxes and fees, then the rest is split between the curator and the authors.

Unlike a typical anthology, the bundling website handles splitting and delivering the revenue. This is a huge plus for the curator as he/she can focus on the content, images, marketing, etc.

Why should an author want to participate in a bundle?

Bundles generally include stories from multiple authors, each of whom has their own set of fans. By participating in a bundle, an author’s work is exposed to readers who might not have come across it otherwise.

The authors typically each do some form of promotion, whether it’s posting on Twitter, sharing information on Facebook, or talking about the bundle in a newsletter or on a blog. Because there are multiple authors all doing promotion, each individual author gets more exposure than they would be able to on their own.

Here are three different ways you can use a Facebook page to direct people to your mailing list/newsletter sign up page.

1. Add a sign up button to your page
2. Provide a link in your page’s cover photo
3. Use an app to add a sign up tab and form

Add a sign up button to your page

Underneath the cover photo on your Facebook page is a button labeled “+ Add a Button.”

If you click on this you’ll see a popup containing a slew of options. To set up a link to your sign up page:

• Select ‘Get in Touch,’ then on the next popup select ‘Sign Up.’
• Enter the URL to the sign up page on your author/publishing press website and hit ‘Add Button.’

Your Facebook page now has a ‘Sign Up’ button that takes you to the link you entered. If you hover over the button you’ll see a ‘Test Button’ link – click it to verify that the button goes where you think it should.
 

 
Provide a link in your page’s cover photo

• Click on your page’s cover photo.
• Edit the description for the photo and add a link to your sign up page.
• Save the description.

Now when someone clicks on your cover photo, the description – with the link you added – will be displayed.

Use an app to add a sign up tab and form

You can use an app to a tab to the sidebar of your page. When the user clicks on that tab, a sign up form will be displayed on your Facebook page.

aWeber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp are a few of the companies who currently provide apps to integrate mailing list/newsletter sign ups with Facebook. Each app works a bit differently, so make sure to read the documentation for whichever one you use.

Here’s a screenshot showing how app configuration works with aWeber. Notice that the list and the form used are options, so you might create one form for use on Facebook and another for use on your website.
 

 
And here’s how this particular sign up form looks on a Facebook page. Notice the ‘Email Signup’ link at the bottom of the sidebar – clicking that takes you to this page. In this screenshot, there’s also a ‘Sign Up’ button under the cover photo that was created following the ‘Add a sign up button to your page’ steps above.
 

 
If your email marketing provider doesn’t offer an app, you can always write one yourself.