Bundling Up for May — Books, Not Coats – Part 1

As a reader, I am fond of:

1. Well-written stories that pull me into their world and won’t let go.

2. An easy way to figure out if a book has sequels if it is part of a series

3. Often a bit of a discount when you buy a bundle

3. Finding out that the author has bundled some of a series together, making it easy for me to get 1, 2, and 3. 

And since May is about spring and Mother’s Day and hopefully bundles of flowers and positive things (like the snow going away and not coming back until it’s winter again), I thought I would “talk” about book bundles this week. 

Because I like getting book bundles, one of the first things I started to do when I began publishing myself was to bundle books/series together. Sometimes I even bundled some not exactly related books together. Lol 

If you follow me on social media, you might not know about all the various books I have bundled together. 

If I climb into the “way back” machine, to revisit my earliest adventures in writing, I find two bundles you might find interesting:

* Perilously Fun Fiction is a compilation of my romantic comedy mystery books. They aren’t connected except by their sense of humor. This bundle includes THE SPY WHO KISSED ME, DO WAH DIDDY DIE, and DO WAH DIDDY DELETE (A short story collection that includes stories related to DO WAH DIDDY DIE and one story I wrote for my daughter— “Deleting Dennis”). 

* Lonesome Lawmen Bundle includes the three books and novella in this short series. Honestly, back then I didn’t really write series. I wrote stand-alone books that sometimes turned into more related series. But this series is darker, more in the thriller/romantic suspense genre, but with my signature humor to lighten the dark. This was actually my first attempt at creating a bundle—or rather, asking my then-publisher to create a bundle. To make the bundle interesting to readers who’d already read the books, I wrote “Lonesome Mama,” the story of the three brothers’ mom having her own adventure. It was super fun to write her story and it might be the beginning of me writing short, related stories to books that turned into series (quite by accident!). 

After these, I might have gone a little crazy with the bundles, but I dialed them back and got more focused. Well, as focused as I can get. Which isn’t a lot of focused, but enough to progress with two main series:

* The Big Uneasy. I started bundling it as soon as I had three books and a short story, but I recently went back and cleaned up the early bundle and added another book to it. So I have two bundles for this series:

1. THE BIG UNEASY BUNDLE which includes RELATIVELY RISKY, DEAD SPACES, LOUISIANA LAGNIAPPE, WORRY BEADS, and the bonus short story “Family Treed.” 

2. AN UNEASY COLLECTION is kind of my embarrassing bundle. Last year, around the time the world shut down? Maybe you noticed that at some point? Well, I commissioned a cover for this collection and then…forgot about it. Yeah. So I released this last month. It includes LOUISIANA LAGNIAPPE, WORRY BEADS, and FAIS DO DO DIE. Yes, I know that LOUISIANA LAGNIAPPE is in both books, and so is WORRY BEADS. I’m not sure, but I think my reasoning at the time was that maybe someone had read the early books and wanted to catch up. But we’ll never know for sure. 

Since this post is getting a bit long, I’m going to continue it next week where I’ll be explaining how my Project Enterprise bundles happened. And some other hidden bundle gems lurking around my websites. Stay tuned! 

So, do you like bundles? What are some of your favorite bundle deals? 

Perilously yours,

Pauline