Glad you asked! StoryBundle is a way for people who love to read to discover quality indie books written by indie authors. You know how it's always hard to find something good to read? StoryBundle hopes to solve that.
We take a handful of books—anywhere from six to nine—and group them together to offer as a bundle. Then you, the reader, can take a look at the titles we've chosen and decide how much you'd like to pay. Think of us like a friend that scours independent books for undiscovered gems, then bundles these titles together for one low price that you decide. Yeah, we mean it; you get to set the price that you want to pay!
The StoryBundle concept is pretty simple. There are a fixed set of books that we offer in a bundle, and each bundle is available only for a limited time. If you miss out on the bundle, you'll have to buy the books individually from each author. We feature each bundle only once, once it's gone, it's gone. (We are working on a way to bring back past bundles, but don't have anything concrete yet.)
Again, one of the central concepts is that you get to decide how much each bundle is worth to you. Think each individual book in a bundle of five books is worth $2? That's fine! Pay $10 and get five books! Only think they're worth $1 each because you're not sure if you like a certain genre? That's fine too. If you want to reward these authors and encourage more independent writers by giving a bit more, that's fantastic as well. One reason we started StoryBundle is because indie authors need our support, and we want to do our part in showcasing awesome writers.
All you have to do to get the bonus book is to meet the bonus threshold. Sometimes the bonus threshold will be a set number, but sometimes it will be the average price that readers have paid for the bundle so far. If it's an average price, that means it will be a moving target, sometimes going up and sometimes going down. When you meet the bonus threshold—set when you purchase the bundle—you'll get the bonus title(s) include with your bundle automatically. You don't have to do anything else.
Of course! just visit this link and enter the email you used when you purchased the bundle you're looking for. If you've purchased multiple bundles with that address, we'll send you all the bundles associated with that email.
Gift cards are a new feature we added for the Holiday Gift Bundle that allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle! When someone receives a gift card, they can keep the code (codes never expire) and decide for themselves when they want to redeem it. If they don't like this current bundle and would prefer, say, a romance or a sci-fi bundle, they can wait until a bundle they like comes up and redeem it then. Best of all, all gift cards are bonus-enabled, so the gift recipient won't miss out on any books in the bundle.
Not only can you decide how much of your money is going to the authors and how much is going to keep StoryBundle running, but you can also give a portion to charity. Just choose which charity you'd like to donate to from our list of causes, and they'll get 10% of your purchase. You're supporting indie authors and giving to a worthy cause at the same time.
Easy! Just decide how much you want to pay for the bundle and choose from our three available payment methods. For example, if there are five books in a bundle and you want to pay $10 for all five, just enter $10. Then, pick either PayPal, Amazon Payments or pay directly with your credit card, depending on which one you're most comfortable with, and you're all set.
The titles are pre-set and fixed for each bundle ahead of time, so everyone has an equal opportunity to get the same awesome books. However, if you do have a suggestion for an indie book you're dying to see in a bundle, feel free to email us and we'll consider it for a future bundle.
Our bundles are packaged together to provide the most value for people who love reading, so they're only offered as a whole. And because we carefully and deliberately pick these books so that if you like one of the titles, you're pretty darn likely to like the others as well. If you would like to only buy one title, feel free to visit the author's site and buy it directly from them.
Yes! These ebooks are meant for your tablet, ebook reader or smartphone. It doesn't matter if you have an Amazon Kindle, and Apple iPad, any Android tablet or any other ebook reader, you should be able to read our books. All our titles come in .epub formats, so if you're familiar with syncing books to your device already, you can do sync our books the exact same way.
Nope, our books have no DRM on it whatsoever. If you're not familiar with DRM, it's file protection that locks books into one specific brand of ebook reader, so for example, if you buy a book from Amazon, you can only read them on Kindles or devices that support the Kindle app. The books from StoryBundle can be read on any app, reader, tablet or device that supports these very common ebook file types. Our files are not locked down whatsoever!
If you've ever read a book on your Kindle or iPad, reading these are pretty much the same. Here are detailed instructions on how to get the books onto your device of choice.
As of right now, you can't. However, we know some people really love indie authors but also love holding paper in their hands. We get it, so we're currently investigating services to see if there's a good way for us to get you both the digital versions as well as the analog versions in future bundles.
StoryBundle features indie authors from all different genres and styles. We feel it's important to find those titles that aren't on the New York Times bestseller lists and give them exposure. This isn't just because we want to encourage and stimulate independent authors to tell fantastic stories, but because we're readers too and we want more stuff to read. The more authors there are out there, the more likely it is there will be works that appeal to us. We love reading.
So with that in mind, we choose authors from all over the place, all with quality work that we think you'll enjoy reading. We read all the titles ourselves (like we said, we love reading) to make sure they're up to snuff, so you're pretty unlikely to get any duds. You can count on each book being in the bundle being a book we've enjoyed ourselves.
Our policy is to evaluate refunds on a case-by-case basis. If you feel that you qualify for a refund (or you just really really think you should get one), please email us at support@storybundle.com with the reason for your refund, the email address you used to buy the bundle and the order number from the payment service you used. Having all this info will help speed up the process.
As much as we would like to truly let everyone pay what they want, there are some logistical reasons why we've set the minimum bundle price at $3 for most bundles (and for some bundles with a LOT of content, we set it at $5). We believe that most people are honest, but there are some people that think that the bundle is worth $0 to them, and thus would be downloading all the books for free. That's fine in a theoretical sense, since people should have a right to set their own prices, but it's hard to think that five author's work is worth absolutely nothing!
In addition, if we allowed people to download bundles for free, they're using up resources and bandwidth that would otherwise be serving other customers who paid for a bundle. Ultimately, we decided that $3 was a fair price in order to see that each author receives at least something for their effort, and that StoryBundle isn't losing money on each download.
There's a quirk with Android devices (this includes the Kindle Fire) which will show the covers as blank on books you send to your device using our method. All you have to do is reboot your device and the covers will show up normally.
We're always in search of awesome indie books, so we're interested in checking out your work. If you're an author, email us at submissions@storybundle.com.
If have any questions that we haven't answered here, please email us at support@storybundle.com and our trained staff of space chimps will get back to you as soon as they're able to learn how to type. (Any day now!)
