I’ve organized five itch.io bundles. Four of them have already happened, and one of them is still live for a few more hours. Here are links to all of them1:
Note: These links contain NSFW materials.
The Transgender Artists Bundle [October 2021; $5,139.12 / 16 contributors]
The Queer Erotica Bundle [February 2022; $1,750.00 / 11 contributors]
The Transgender Artists Bundle II [August 2022; $154.12 / 12 contributors]
Queerotica 2025 Bundle [January 2025; $13,908.70 / 25 contributors]
Bundle With Benefits 2025 [November 2025; $5,150+ / 25 contributors]
No, that’s not a typo; the second Transgender Artists Bundle literally made only $154. But we’ll circle back around to that when I talk about what not to do.
I’ve also been in a variety of bundles organized by other people, ranging from mega charity bundles to smaller for-profit bundles. I consider myself to be something of a bundle expert, and I hope I can impart some bundle wisdom to any independent artists reading this.
The Ways in Which a Bundle can be Organized
Broadly speaking, there are four ways to organize an itch.io bundle:
1: Doing things The Old Fashioned Way; contacting people one-by-one at every step of the bundle’s organizing, from finding participants to sending out approval forms.
2: Organizing the bundle using a central Discord server that you invite people to.
3: Using Google Forms for bundle applications and moving forward from there.
4: Creating a jam on itch.io and then having itch.io put the bundle together for you.
There’s a lot of overlap between these categories. For instance, I once applied to someone’s bundle using a Google Form, and after I was approved I was forwarded to a Discord server. But hopefully you see how there are distinctions here.
I have no personal experience organizing a bundle using Google Forms, and so I can’t offer any guidance there. And I advise against organizing a bundle using a jam that’s sent to itch.io, because if you do that you’re at the mercy of itch.io’s extremely inefficient support team. Unless you’re putting together a mega bundle that will contain literally hundreds of people, there’s no good reason to ever use method #42.
The Old Fashioned Way vs Using a Discord Server
Using a Discord server has many advantages. It’s a lot easier to talk to everyone at the same time, and if you feel like asking all of your contributors a question you can create a poll. You can also make a channel for promotion links, where everyone can post their posts advertising the bundle so other members can easily repost them . . . post.
There isn’t really an aspect where the old fashioned method is better. Sure, you get less oversight, which means you can remove people from the bundle if you feel like you need to without anyone noticing3. And the overlap of people who put their stuff on itch.io who don’t use Discord is extremely small. There are going to be some people who don’t use Discord, but you can easily make note of that handful of people while continuing to use the server.
In short, I think servers are the way to go, and I don’t think I’m going to do things The Old Fashioned Way again.
Tips Applicable to Organizing Any Bundle
1. Tread with caution.
It’s basically impossible to scam someone with an itch.io bundle. Literally every person joining a bundle has to approve their inclusion, or the bundle cannot go live, and so the organizer has to keep everything above-board. I cannot think of a way someone might get fucked over by a bundle.
That being said, with anything that involves money, people might assume some kind of scam is happening. I’ve contacted some people who’ve made a lot of money on itch who know surprisingly little about what bundles are and how they work. When you’re sending messages out to people, you should make an effort to sound genuine and legitimate.
2. You need to have already networked.
When I organized the first Transgender Artists Bundle I had already been a member of a trans game developer community on Discord for one or two years. I’d met a bunch of different people, and at least 70% of the people in that bundle were members of that Discord server.
When I organized the Queer Erotica Bundle, I’d been a member of an erotica writing community, and that’s how I found the first 5~ contributors to the bundle. When I sent cold-calls to potential participants, I was able to name-drop people who’d already agreed to join.
If you’re not a member of any artistic communities, you probably won’t be able to organize a bundle. You need a bedrock of people who know and trust you to build confidence in other people. These communities don’t need to be Discord servers; you can also contact mutuals on Tumblr, Twitter, Bluesky, etc. As long as the people already know who you are.
3. It gets easier each time.
When I was cold-calling people while organizing my second bundle, I would usually include a link to my first bundle, to show them that I wasn’t wasting their time. When I was organizing my fourth bundle, I included links to my first two bundles. More experience, more credibility.
We’ll get around to talking about that third bundle, don’t worry.
4. Make a deadline.
I feel like, if it takes more than three weeks to organize a bundle, the first people you contacted might start to wonder what’s happening. So, I’ve organized all of my bundles within the space of two weeks. If you tell people you might take as long as a month, I’m sure they’ll understand, but I like to work fast.
In my experience, you can get away with longer organizing periods if you use a Discord server. The server membership creates a sense of permanence that allows organizing to take serveral months. If you’re trying to put together a 50 person bundle, a server might be your best option.
5. It’s hard work.
Organizing a bundle can be an oddly stressful task. I get anxious that I’m annoying people when I contact them. Until the last person has approved the bundle, I have an uncomfortable unresolved feeling inside of me. It doesn’t help that bundle organizing involves regular contact with a lot of people, and sometimes people can be difficult.
6. People can be difficult.
I usually get the feeling while organizing a bundle that the people I’m inviting don’t understand how logistically complicated it can be.
For almost every bundle I’ve done, I’ve encouraged friends of mine to upload their work to itch.io for the first time. Sometimes people take care of that very quickly. Other people will work at a leisurely pace, and worse, not respond in a timely fashion when you ask for progress updates.
For my last bundle I wanted to have exactly 25 people, so everyone would get an even 4% split of the money. In practice this meant that, if someone said they would get something onto itch.io, but they ended up flaking, I would’ve needed to find other people to replace them. That kind of uncertainty can be very stress-inducing, especially when your 25 person roster is nearly full.
People who already have stuff on itch.io might also want to upload new projects in time for the bundle. I accommodate these people, but they can add an undesirable element of ambiguity to the organizing process. Remember that every person who makes some kind of special request is going to add a big question mark to your workload.
Using Discord can help here, thankfully. You make a channel where people post their links to reserve a spot in the bundle, and if they want to edit those links they can. When you have the desired number of posts in the channel you’re done, problem solved.
7. Stay organized.
You need to keep detailed notes as you’re organizing your bundle. In the past I would keep a list of people that I want to invite into my bundle, and as they joined I would populate a seven column table. You might be wondering what the Final Y/N column is for; it wasn’t to see if they’ve approved their inclusion in the bundle (can easily be seen on itch.io), but rather, so I can keep track of who I’d sent approval links to.
With the aforementioned project links channel on Discord, it’s not necessary to have a table like this.
8. You might be surprised by how willing people are to contribute.
While organizing the Queerotica Bundle I contacted a lot of famous artists in the internet smut community who had tens of thousands of followers. To my shock and surprise, almost all of them agreed to participate in the bundle. I’m sure it helped that I’d already organized a few bundles before.
9. Write your ad copy in advance.
You should have your bundle description ready before you start putting together the bundle approval form. Making sure you’ve entered all of your bundle info into itch correctly can be a very stressful, anal-retentive experience, and so it’s good to not have to worry about the ad copy on top of that.
10. “Maybe” is not “Yes”.
If you weren’t aware, literally everyone has to approve a bundle, or it doesn’t go live. So you need to make sure each person makes it absolutely clear that they intend to enter X, Y, and Z into the bundle.
While organizing my first bundle, I made the mistake of assuming a friend would want to be a part of it. I won’t go into details here, but it turned out my assumption was incorrect! They did end up approving their inclusion, but it was quite awkward and a good learning experience for future bundles4.
By the way, it’s a good idea to send out approval forms for a bundle at least one or two weeks before it’s supposed to go live, because there’s always one person who takes a long time to approve, for whatever reason. And if everyone is approving a bundle that’s supposed to go live the next day, you might have to create the entire approval form over again.
11. Reach outside.
While organizing the Queerotica Bundle, I managed to find a few creators from slightly different online communities. Kallie, for instance, is a big name in transgender prose erotica circles, while Grumpy-TG is very popular in erotic comic circles. There are certainly overlaps between Kallie and Grumpy’s fanbases, but they will also reach a lot of distinct people when they each advertise the bundle. It’s good to cover multiple connected niches.
12. Tiered pricing is good.
On itch.io, you can have multiple payment tiers in a bundle; pay extra and you receive extra items. The average purchaser of the Queer Erotica Bundle spent $15.90, which means a majority of people digged deeper to pay for the $15 tier.
I’m not an expert with these kinds of things, but I think tiered pricing works like this:
-The customer sees the bundle costs $10, which tells them that it’s cheap.
-They decide to spend $5 extra, which they maybe wouldn’t have spent if they hadn’t already decided the default price of the bundle was cheap.
Wow, it makes me feel ill that I had that thought process.
It’s good to know in advance that you want to do tiered pricing, so that you can ask people if they’re interested in putting items in different tiers when you first contact them. I always make sure I stress the $15 tier is completely optional, because I understand that some people might want all their items to be highly accessible.
13. Stress to contributors that they have time.
This is highly specific advice, but if you’re inviting someone to itch.io and the bundle is being organized far in advance, you might want to specify to them that they just need to upload a minimum viable product. For instance, one of the people in the Queerotica bundle wanted to upload a book they’d written, but they wanted to make some big edits so that it would be polished first.
I told them that they just needed to upload the original draft of the book, and that in the months before the bundle went live they could update the PDF. It’s not ideal, but sometimes that’s the difference between someone deciding to join the bundle or thinking they can’t.
Ultimately, I think of it like this: if the item could pass as an acceptable beta product in itself, it’s not deceitful to upload a WIP version of it.
14. People cannot join a bundle if they can’t initiate payouts.
After working on the Queerotica Bundle for a little over two weeks, I was ready for it to be over. The final person got their stuff ready. I put everything into itch.io and created the approval form. I sent the approval form out to all other 24 contributors. Almost everyone had approved it.
And then I got an email from someone. They said they couldn’t approve their inclusion in the bundle because they weren’t able to initiate a payout on itch.io. They couldn’t do that because of problems they’d had with payment processors in relation to selling adult content on the internet.
This kind of moralizing from payment processors is total bullshit. It should be illegal. The ACLU is trying to do something about it. I should make it clear, itch.io preventing someone from approving their inclusion from a bundle for this reason is a weird confluence of things, a coincidence, and obviously not them condoning what the payment processors did.
All that being said, make sure people can initiate a payout when you’re asking them to join a bundle. Stress to them that they will probably know if they can’t initiate a payout, and if they’ve never had a problem they’re probably fine.
I had to delete my original bundle page and re-do the last few steps of the process. It was a worst-case scenario, and extremely annoying. Hopefully you don’t have to deal with something like this.
15. Help is good.
Inevitably you’ll need to ask people for help when organizing a bundle, and that’s ok. Usually help comes in the form of helping you contact people who are hard to reach, or providing you with personal recommendations of people to invite.
Post-Mortem: Transgender Artists Bundle II
Let’s talk about the reasons why the second Transgender Artists Bundle failed.
- Too many free items. It’s ok to have a small handful of free items in a bundle, but when the majority of items are free it, quite literally, damages the value proposition of a bundle. At least 80% of items in a bundle should cost money.
- No popular people. With one or two exceptions, there weren’t any huge creators in the bundle, which meant it didn’t get a lot of marketing. The same could mostly be said about the original Trans Artists bundle, but that one managed to get featured on the front page of itch, and it received some media coverage.
- Relatedly, it was too insular, going against my “reach outside” advice. Once again, the original bundle was also guilty of this, but it received the aforementioned boosts.
- There was a small disaster with one of the people I invited into the bundle; they made a new project, but didn’t put any files into the project page. Anyone who clicked their project and noticed they’d literally be purchasing nothing may have thought the entire bundle was a scam.
- 2022 was a year filled with mega-bundles. There were a lot of huge charity bundles in 2022, and so even if I’d managed to avoid all of the mistakes I’ve mentioned, I still don’t think it would’ve been a massive success. Timing is important; the reason the Queerotica bundle is happening in January is to avoid overlapping with other bundles.
Advice for Contributors: Have an accessible contact!
There’s nothing more tragic than me finding someone that’s perfect for a bundle, and then discovering that they don’t have any publicly available contact information. I understand that a popular artist might want to avoid getting random DMs from people on Bluesky. But it’s not difficult to make a dedicated public business email. This isn’t just for bundles, who knows how many editors have tried and failed to contact you! People don’t like conducting business in public; I’m not going to @ you about joining a bundle!
Also, it needs to be said, if the only websites where random users can DM you are Fur Affinity and DeviantArt, you don’t have a way for anyone to contact you.
Advice for Contributors: Put stuff in your calendar!
A lot of bundles happen at the same time every year, and so it’s a good idea to put reminders in your calendar app to check and see if a bundle sign-up has gone live. Put down multiple reminds for each bundle, across different months. The sign-up for the Queer Games Bundle went up late last year, and so it was good that I had a reminder already set to re-check next month.
If you’re joining a bundle that’s going live a few weeks or months after the approval form is sent out, you should probably make an effort to keep track of that as well, to prepare for marketing.
Conclusion
I’ve taught you everything I know about making bundles. Because I’ve been so generous with my advice, I hope you invite me into any bundles you organize. I’ve got a lot of different things on my itch page; books, music, TTRPGs, comics . . . you can almost definitely slot me in5.
I think I’ve communicated that there are a lot of challenges to organizing a bundle, but it’s also an incredibly rewarding experience. A lot of the people in the bundles I organize are people that I consider to be internet friends, sometimes even actual friends that I incidentally communicate with over the internet. And it feels extremely rewarding when I know I’ve made someone enough money through a bundle that I’ve covered the cost of their electricity bill for a given month, or even all of their utilities. It makes me feel like I’ve made a difference.
And, of course, I get to make a nice chunk of change for myself.
SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.
- If you’re not familiar with itch.io, you cannot buy a bundle after it has ended; the page is only kept up as an archival thing. ↩︎
- Itch.io’s bundle organizing form apparently glitches if someone tries to input too many contributors. ↩︎
- I’ve never done this, but in hindsight I wish I had once or twice. ↩︎
- If you get into this kind of situation, you should simply remake your approval form and send it out again. It’s annoying and stressful, but ultimately not as bad as it might sound. ↩︎
- This isn’t a joke. ↩︎
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 