Lessons Learned from Creating a Fantasy Box Set

Your first book is probably the most important story of the collection, but if you are a new author, it will not be as well-written as the later books. Like most new writers, I stumbled along and changed my mind about story arcs, improving my writing skills as I went. After publishing the first two stories of my series, it occurred to me it might have been wise to withhold publication and release the series all at once so I could change characters’ backstories or names if it made sense for later stories.

I waited to release the last three books and did so within a month of one other. This allowed me the time to make changes throughout the series for consistency. This strategy also helps marketing and publicity – releasing each book close to the others builds momentum.

It took me ten years to write and finish the series. As each book came out, I created cover designs specific to each story. When I looked at the collection of covers a decade later, I realized it didn’t look like a series. The imagery wasn’t cohesive; the fonts were different, and the books didn’t look like they belonged together. I thought I would ask someone on Fiverr to create new covers for the entire series so it would look more like a fantasy book series, but when I looked at the art of typical fantasy series, I had second thoughts. My stories aren’t swashbuckling romance stories, and the buxom women and muscled males with thunder in the background and large neon text didn’t seem right.

I kept looking for designers that matched my style and ended up going with a minimalistic design that felt like a better fit. I have an art background and strong opinions on visual impact. I have read up on book design considerations and understand that readers want to have that quick visual approval that the genre is correct and the author understands conventions.

Sometimes you make ill-advised decisions, but you must trust yourself in the end.

Over the decade I wrote the stories, I learned more about book design. I improved the formatting; I should have kept each novel’s layout, fonts, and styles the same. I ended up adding the pre-existing manuscripts to my Jutoh project, and then I had to go in and reformat everything. There was probably a way to merge styles and batch format, but I don’t use Jutoh often, so I didn’t know how. I had to reformat all five texts individually. In my case, if you figure 40 chapters for five books, that makes 200 heading style revisions, and at least that many changes of the body text.

One book contains illustrations of different sizes and shapes, so I had to go into Sigil and adjust the HTML code for the image sizes. Maybe I should have made the images the same size, but it was too late for a major alteration like that.

I discovered that the best way to do this is to put everything in one document and fix it before importing it into Jutoh. In MS Word, you can find/replace styles. There is a way to change styles and link them in Jutoh, but it wasn’t easy to figure out. If I did ebooks every day, I would take the time to figure it out, but it made little sense to tackle the process when I was already frustrated. You can apply your own style sheets (CSS), but you would have to know all the existing styles first, and I wasn’t able to identify them other than sifting through the class descriptions in the code.

I doubt I’ll ever do a series again, but I will plan it better if I do.

I wanted to do my own box set image and searched out software to make clean box set images. The software ranged from $37-$200+, and it all looked like it had a steep learning curve. On Fiverr, I found someone making them for $5. I wasn’t sure they would do a good job, but I figured it was such a low cost I wouldn’t lose much if it didn’t work out. I ended up spending about $15 on the perfect image. If I had bought the software and done it myself, it would have taken me hours to figure out how to do it, and it would not have looked as good as what the seller on Fiverr delivered.

In summary, if I ever do another box set, I will plan it out ahead of time. Next time, I will also write out basic outlines for all the stories and have a developmental editor check it before I start!