Bundling your ebooks into a set
A printed omnibus has to be manufactured, and a 900-page brick runs into page limits, gutter and cost. A digital set has none of that. It is a file, and the second copy costs what the first one did.
Which is why it is one of the most dependable new products a finished series can produce. The commercial case — why readers buy it, when to make one, what it does for a backlist — belongs to Box sets and omnibus editions. This guide is the part that decides whether the file is any good.
A set is one new book, not five old ones
Treat it as a new edition from the start. It is a single ebook containing several complete books, and it gets its own identifier — some stores assign one, others expect an ISBN you supply, so check what each of yours wants — its own cover, its own listing and its own description. See Do you need your own ISBN? and Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book.
What it is not is a folder of five files, and it is not the series page on a store. It is one thing a reader opens, and everything below follows from that.
The navigation has to work on two levels
This is what hand-built sets get wrong, and it is the difference between a set a reader can use and one they abandon.
A reader in a five-book set needs to reach any book, and then any chapter inside that book. That means the contents is a two-level structure: the five titles, each expanding to its own chapters. Two failures are common.
A flat list of five titles. The reader can reach the start of book four and nothing else. Somewhere around chapter nineteen they put their thumb down, lose their place, and have to scroll.
A flat list of every chapter. A hundred and forty entries with no book boundaries, and "Chapter One" appearing five times. The reader cannot tell where book two ends.
Chapter numbering restarting at each book is correct — that is how the books were written — but the contents has to carry the book title above each run, or the restarts read as an error.
Each book needs a title page inside the set
A reader does not always arrive at the front. They come from a sample, from a search result, from the place they stopped three weeks ago. A title page at the head of each book — the title, the series position, a break before it — is how they know where they are, and it marks the moment one story ends and the next begins. Without it, that moment is a heading that looks like any other chapter opening.
Front matter once, back matter once
Built carelessly, a set inherits five of everything.
Consolidate the front matter. One copyright page for the set, covering every title inside it, with the original copyright years and, where you use your own, the ISBNs of the editions. See What belongs on a copyright page. One set-level title page. Dedications and epigraphs stay with the book they belong to, immediately after that book's title page, because they are part of that book rather than of the collection. See What goes in the front of a book, and in what order.
Back matter goes at the end, once. The "also by" list, the newsletter sign-up, the review ask and the link to whatever they should read next belong after the last book, not after every book. A reader who hits your newsletter pitch four times before they have finished the story is being interrupted, and they say so in reviews. See The back of the book is where your next sale is.
In the Interior Formatter. It builds front and back matter from fields and generates the contents from the manuscript's real chapter structure, so a combined set is poured as one book rather than stitched from five — and the EPUB carries chapter numbering, declared language and ARIA roles into the file. Start your ebook → · about the Interior Formatter
The traps in assembling one
Five "The End" pages. If you build the set by concatenating the finished individual files, you get every closing page, every acknowledgment, every author bio, five times over. Strip them before you pour, keeping one of each at the end.
Links pointing at the standalone editions. Book two's back matter says "read book three", linked to the store listing for book three — which the reader is holding. Every internal reference has to be rewritten to point within the set, or removed. See Links in an ebook, and where they should point.
A file that has grown enough to matter. Five novels of text is not a problem. Five novels of text plus five cover images plus maps and ornaments can be, and file size affects the reader's download as well as how some stores handle the file. See Why your ebook is enormous, and what to do.
Untested navigation. Tap every contents entry in the finished file, both levels, and confirm each lands at the top of the right book and the right chapter. Five books is five times the chances of an entry pointing one chapter late. See Checking an ebook before you publish it.
The cover is a new cover
The set needs its own, and its first job is to not look like book four.
The reader you most want already owns book one, so a cover in the same layout with a different word in the title slot gets scrolled past. Promote the series name to the largest element, and drop the individual titles to a small ordered list that confirms what is inside — the same restraint Putting the series number on the cover asks for on the single volumes. See Series covers: the same shelf, three books along.
What does not work is the five covers tiled. At the size a store actually shows it — a thumbnail on a phone — a grid of five covers is five illegible rectangles and no title anyone can read. Judge it small before you commit: The thumbnail test and Ebook cover size, and why it is not your print front.
What to charge, and whether to keep the individual books on sale, is Box sets and omnibus editions.
Make your ebook
The tools are free to use: bring your manuscript once and get both a print PDF and an EPUB out of the same source, so the two editions cannot drift apart. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Novellas, serials and short books · More: Splitting a book into volumes · Art that reads across a row of spines