Adding Book Four to My Series, and Updating Every Book, in Five Minutes

I'm Jo. I make Koberger, and I'm also an indie author. Safe Hands, book four in my series The Blues, is finished, so I recorded myself getting it ready to publish. I wanted to show the part of publishing a series that nobody warns you about, and how long it actually takes me now.

The answer was five minutes, near enough to the second.

The job nobody warns you about

When you publish a new book in a series, the new book is only half the work. Every book you've already published has a list of your other books at the back, and it's now out of date. So is anything else that mentions what's coming next.

Before, that meant opening every book, editing the same page over and over, and making fresh files for each one. I've got seven novels now, counting Safe Hands, plus a couple of short stories and some box sets, and every one of them carries that list. That's the same edit, file after file, and a fresh chance to miss one each time. It's exactly the kind of job you put off, and readers notice when your older books don't mention your latest one.

Here's how I do it now.

1. Bring in the manuscript

I'd already prepared Safe Hands in Word, so I added a new book and chose the file. Koberger found all 39 chapters and set the book up around them, with nothing to fix.

2. Use the design I've already made

Every book in the series looks the same, because I saved my design once and reuse it. Instead of starting from one of the ready-made designs, I picked my own, and Safe Hands instantly matched books one to three.

3. Add the pages I've written once

Some people put their front and back matter straight into their Word file. I keep mine separate, and for a series that's where Koberger really pays off.

My copyright page, my thank you page and the list of all my books live in Koberger's Section Library. I add them to each new book rather than rewriting them. I added a title page as well, and Koberger knew to put it at the front.

The clever part is that these pages fill themselves in. My copyright page has spaces for the year and the cover designer, and they're filled from the book's details. I design my own covers, so I added myself as cover designer, set the cover image, and the copyright page picked it all up. My thank you page names the book it's in, so it says Safe Hands without me touching it.

4. Update the list of my books once

This is the bit that saves me the most time. My list of books is one section in the library, linked into every book I've published. So I opened it, added Safe Hands with its link, and saved.

That's it. The new book's back matter now lists it, and when I opened one of the earlier books in the series, its list was already up to date too. One edit, every book.

For the links themselves, I use Koberger's universal book links, which send each reader to the right store for them. That's a whole video of its own.

5. Add it to the series

Next, I added Safe Hands to The Blues. It keeps the books together in reading order, and it sets me up for later. I've already made a box set of the first three books, and with book four in the series I can make a new box set of all four, or any run of them, in a few clicks. I can also add a page to every book in the series at once, which I'll show another time.

6. Make fresh files for every book at once

Finally, everything I've published needed new files, because every book's back matter had changed. Rather than export them one at a time, I used Koberger's bulk export: I selected all my books, chose EPUB, and let it make them all. When it's finished, you can download the lot as one zip, ready to upload to Amazon and the other stores.

Five minutes, and nothing forgotten

A new book finished, and every older book updated with the new back matter, in five minutes. More importantly, nothing got missed: I didn't have to remember which books mention which, because the list lives in one place.

If you're writing a series, that's the habit I'd recommend whatever tool you use. Write your shared pages once, keep them in one place, and let every book use the same copy. For more on keeping a series looking and reading the same, see how to format a book series consistently.

You can try all of this free with your own books. Koberger only asks you to pay when you're ready to download your finished files. See pricing.