Book Bundle 2025 Questionnaire Results

Last year brought many changes to the book market, but one of the more positive ones for indie authors has been the ability to organize our books into bundles on itch.io. Income from these bundles now makes up an extra stream of revenue that in many cases, exceeds revenue seen from dwindling sales on Amazon.

Bundle organization in 2025 was largely based on assumptions about readers and experimentation, which resulted in hit-or-miss results when it came to sales. Since bundle organization takes a lot of time and effort—and marketing efforts from all authors involved, it’s especially frustrating when a bundle flops.

To help improve bundle performance, I created a questionnaire that asked readers for the reason why they had NOT bought a bundle they were interested in.

General information About Respondents

The questionnaire was mainly shared among the Bluesky book community, as well as through several author discords.

The questionnaire had 35 anonymous responses. All respondents say they read indie books, and two thirds (23 people) had bought an itch bundle before.

Market Segmentation

A majority of respondents also buys books from Amazon (67%), Kobo (50%) Smashwords (29.4%) and bookstore.org (26.5%). Only 14% had a Kindle Unlimited subscription. A few readers also mentioned direct sales, brick-and-mortar store sales, libraries, Google Books and Apple Books. This reflects the general growing market fragmentation for eBooks. The lower market share for Amazon gives hope that platforms such as itch.io could establish themselves in the eBook market as long-term, viable marketplaces for authors.

Reach

A vast majority of respondents (34 out of 35) usually hear about bundles on Bluesky—possibly a skewed result due to the questionnaire largely having been shared on Bluesky. However, data from itch.io also indicates that a majority of sales happen through links from Bluesky. Additionally, 5 people also found bundles on Instagram, while 3 heard about bundles through author newsletters.

For the itch.io book community to grow, we should consider setting up channels through which readers outside the Bluesky bubble could be reached, such as a book bundle subreddit or a website that tracks current bundles – links that could easily be shared with friends or family without being tied to one specific bundle.

(Similarly, speaking as an organizer, we need more variety in our bundles, yet it’s hard to find authors outside of our own bubbles, and advertising on 20 different author discords in impractical. Establishing a database where organizers can list open bundles and authors can easily find them and apply to join would help reduce the strain on organizers and authors alike.)

One respondent also complained that they never saw bundles advertised in their time zone (Australia), so usually missed out on them. This is only one person’s experience, but could indicate that the very limited period of visibility on Bluesky posts might hurt bundle sales.

Extras

One way in which a bundle could set itself apart from the competition, or add value for readers who already own several of the books in the bundle, would be through extras, such as printables or exclusive artwork.

However, when asked, 65.7% said they were NOT more likely to buy a bundle if it offered. 25.7% (9 people) said they’d be more likely to buy with extras. The remaining 3 would weigh on a case by case basis. In the case of printables, several respondents said they did not live in the US and had no access to printers—so these extras would be useless for them.

The mixed result indicates it might not be worth the extra effort and hassle that creating printables or exclusive artwork would bring for now. However, if itch.io continues to grow into a bigger platform, with larger audiences buying bundles, catering to the 25% of respondents who WOULD buy a bundle because of exclusive extras could well become viable in the future.

Marketing

With bundles largely being created by authors who might not necessarily be professional graphic designers, I asked respondents how marketing efforts influenced their decision NOT to buy a bundle. The good news: Only 3 people (8.6%) were put off by a lack of professional graphics. Over half of respondents said they had no issues with the marketing around book bundles.

As an author, it can quickly feel icky to advertise books and bundles too much, but in reality, only 2 respondents said too much marketing soured them on buying a bundle. Meanwhile, 7 readers had missed out on a bundle, because too little marketing had made them lose track of it.

7 people (20%) made the decision not to buy a bundle because it lacked descriptions for the individual books under the bundle description. (Readers not embedded in the indie book community, who are unfamiliar with the books and authors on sale, can get overwhelmed by having to click back and forth through every single book to get an idea what they are even about.) This one should be an easy fix for organizers.

Bonus advice: In the case of bundles focused on tropes or themes, rather than a generic line about the book, ask authors to tell readers how the book connects to the bundle’s trope or theme.

Variety of Books

While roughly a quarter of respondents had no issues with book variety, 40% of respondents said they had stepped away from a bundle because they already owned too many of the offered books. This, too, indicates the need to spread marketing efforts for bundles beyond our author bubbles on Bluesky.

28.6% of respondents didn’t buy a bundle because it had too few books in their genre. Many readers also asked for genre-specific bundles. Mixed genre bundles might be less attractive to individual readers, because they end up buying books they would never want to read, and it’s cheaper to separately buy the individual books.

5 people (nearly 15%) felt overwhelmed by too many books in a bundle, while only 2 people skipped a bundle because there were too few books. This ties back to what respondents said about a lack of book descriptions. The more books in a bundle, the more overwhelming the decision to buy becomes, especially as larger bundles also come with price tags that make readers hesitate.

Bundle Runtime

Nearly half (48.6%) said runtime played no issue in their decision against a bundle. 45.7% missed out because they only heard about a bundle when it was already over. A further 22.9% saw the bundle in time, but it had too few days left and they felt too rushed or couldn’t save up for it.

Speaking as an organizer, some authors had horror stories to tell about their book being trapped in bundles with runtimes of several months for far too low a price per sale. To put authors’ fears to rest, many organizers then opted to let their bundles run for a week, sometimes less. The hope was also that this would encourage readers to buy immediately, rather than put off the decision only to then forget. However, only 5 respondents (14.3%) said this actually happened and they missed out on a bundle because they postponed.

Far more often, bundles are still getting shared a week or two after they ended, showing there would have been interested buyers that are only now getting word of the bundle. Smaller creators simply do not have the marketing power to make a sale be seen quickly by large amounts of people—except with a huge stroke of luck or with a great group effort like the Narratess sale. The scarcity and pressure sales tactics used by large companies do not work for us, and are more likely to hurt our relationships with our communities, who end up feeling stressed and rushed, rather than excited, when they see a bundle they should love.

Pricing

As with any product, pricing plays a huge role in whether readers buy a bundle or opt out. The good news: For roughly a third of respondents (12 people) bundle price played no role in their decision whether to buy a bundle.

Of the 19 people who refused to buy a bundle because it was too expensive, only 4 wanted bundles to be priced below $10. 12 respondents (34.3%) said bundles should be priced between $10 and $20. The remaining 3 thought a price between $30 and $40 would be fair.

The other 4 respondents would base their decision on how many books were in the bundle and how much they wanted those books.

Things Respondents Would Like to See

Smaller bundles, genre-specific bundles, bundles focused around themes or tropes

Black authors, queer SFF, Hard SF, Mystery, or Urban Fantasy

Buyers were split on the topics of horror, thrillers, and gore. Some specifically wanted less grimdark and gore and would like to see more cozy books. Others specifically requested horror.

Conclusions

Most readers seem to agree that book bundles offer good value for money. However, they won’t buy bundles that don’t offer good value for THEM.

Several readers asked for smaller, more focused bundles, limited to one genre or theme, or centered around an identity, such as queer or black author-focused. This tracks with bundle sales in 2025, where queer and trans bundles seemed to be doing especially well, while mixed genre bundles were a hard sell.

For authors and bundle organizers smaller, narrow-focused bundles can be a double-edge sword. Some readers may welcome books around a theme such as “dragons”, but organizing bundles around a narrow topic severely limits the number of eligible books and authors – possibly preventing a bundle from even finding enough entries, or limiting their reach, either by having too few authors involved or by appealing to too small an audience.

These are mostly issues of scale. As the community of authors and readers on itch.io grows, more focused bundles should become more feasible. Alternatively, a central database showing available bundles for readers, and open bundle slots for interested authors, could help with visibility. Unfortunately, discoverability on itch.io itself is low, with some bundles not even showing up in the bundle search and the larger itch.io community focused solely on games.

On book variety, a notable split seems to exist between fans of horror and those who don’t want horror or gore at all. Similarly, some readers wanted bundles with non-romance, spice-free books, while others requested books centered around topics of sexuality.

Unfortunately, the questionnaire didn’t ask a question around these splits, so it’s impossible to tell whether they’re widespread or limited to those who felt strongly enough about it to write in a response. Still, organizers looking to split up too-large bundles could take those divides into account. For example, rather than splitting a Fantasy bundle into bundles 1 and 2, bundles could be divided into darker and more hopeful stories, or romantasy and non-romance bundles.

It may also make sense to give gory, horror, or romance and spice-centered books their own bundles. Similarly, there is probably a market for cozy, gore-free, or romance-free book bundles.

A further split exists in bundle pricing, between buyers willing to pay high prices (and often add tips) to support authors and specific communities, and buyers who hope or need to find good value.

Nearly half of respondents thought a fair bundle price should be below $20 and opted out of buying bundles they deemed too expensive. These readers were not necessarily demanding a race to the bottom for authors, but they weren’t comfortable with bundles priced above $20, regardless of the number of books offered in exchange. One respondent even missed out on a bundle because they didn’t have enough time to save up for it.

As organizers, pricing bundles competitively is a must, however, we should also take into account the question of value. One respondent wrote that seeing 50 books advertised for $20 made them think “these must not be very good”. For the indie author community, nothing is won by getting authors to switch to itch.io, if we normalize compensation rates under even the $0.30 from a $0.99 sale on Amazon. Our bundles shouldn’t reinforce the perception that indie books are of lesser value.

Rather, if we establish that a fair rate of compensation for authors should not go below $0.50 to $0.70, we may even be able to work toward normalizing a higher “on sale” price for eBooks on other platforms.

Because itch.io only takes 10% of royalties compared to Amazon’s 70%, this evens out to $0.55 to $0.77 per book, still offering readers a better value per book than a $0.99 sale. For the readers looking to support authors, this higher compensation may even be a selling point which we should take into account in bundle advertising.

If we want to optimize pricing, instead of slashing author compensation, we should look into limiting bundle size, so we can keep bundles in the $10 to $20 price range most readers seem to be comfortable with.

Pushing forward as a community, we should make an effort to encourage more authors to put their books on itch.io. While it’s fantastic that the trans and queer communities are becoming more established on itch.io, the platform is still largely unknown to other groups of readers. Many gamers who frequent the site are surprised to hear that books are even being sold on it. Other readers have never even heard of the website.

To make bundles more feasible, to make the books in the bundles more visible to more readers, and to be able to offer a larger variety of books and bundles to readers, we need to encourage more people to visit the site and more authors to try out itch.io. This will only happen if we can improve the quality of our bundles, and appeal to readers and authors of all kinds of genres and communities.