Metadata Madness

I’ve written multiple series with the same main characters – Caina, Ridmark, Mazael, and Nadia – I have noticed that the read through from series to series tends to drop. Like, it’s hard to get people from THE GHOSTS to GHOST EXILE.

I think metadata might be the difficulty.

Amazon and all the other major ebook stores now have series managers. Like, when you publish a book, you can say it’s “Book 2 in DRAGONSKULL” and on the store page it will show up as book 2 of the DRAGONSKULL series.

I wondered if it would be a good idea to merge the connected series into one single uber-series. Like, combining THE GHOSTS, GHOST EXILE, and GHOST NIGHT into one single massive 28-book series with a single series page on the various stores. Of course, I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not.

I decided to try it with DEMONSOULED. If you’ve read all of the Mazael Cravenlock books, you know that he’s the main character in three series – DEMONSOULED, MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED, and WRAITHSHARD. Each series had its own series page, but since DEMONSOULED is currently in Kindle Unlimited and therefore only on Amazon, I decided to join the three series together into one massive 15-book uber-series.

The MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED trilogy, for instance, by December 14th had made more than it had in all of November. And as of 12/27/2021, DEMONSOULED, MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED, and WRAITHSHARD made 20% more in December than they had in November, even with the usual Christmas dip in ebook sales.

So clearly joining them together into one mega-series was a good idea. That said, I’m not sure how well it would work outside of Amazon. The problem is that Apple is very picky about what goes on a cover image, so if I wanted to combine FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARA into one mega-series, the series number on all of the SEVENFOLD SWORD and DRAGONTIARA books would have be changed to say “FROSTBORN”, and that would be hideously expensive.

Still, it’s something I’ll need to think about for 2022.

-JM