A lot of people are drawn to selling books because of the freedom it provides. You get to be your own boss, set your own hours and do business the way you see fit. However, the fact that there is no one to impose rules on you doesn’t mean that there are no rules and anything goes. If you want to be successful at selling books it’s important to set up rules for yourself, to have a coherent strategy. Otherwise, as much as you love the freedom of being a bookseller, you may not be one for very long.
One very useful tool for building a strategy is Amazon’s Sales Rank. If you’re not familiar with Sales Rank, it’s basically a measure of how high sales are on Amazon for a given book. A lower number means higher sales so for instance, a book with a Sales Rank of 1,000 might sell 100 copies a week, while a book with a sales rank of 500,000 might sell only one copy a week.
You can make good use of this information when you are developing a strategy for the books you add to your inventory. You can set down a boundary and say “I will only buy books that have a page rank under x number” (remembering of course that lower number s are actually better, just like it’s better to get 1st place than it is to get 128th).
Let me illustrate the importance of having a strategy like this with three different real-life examples. I’ve briefly mentioned that I have helped other booksellers to set up their own businesses. However, as time as progressed, they’ve each decided to run their business in their own distinct way.
There’s been a lot of speculation lately about what the future of reading will look like. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard a lot about the Kindle and a lot of peoples various opinions on what impact, if any, it will have on the publishing industry.