Shipping brings with it a new set of questions: what carrier to use, what speed, what cost, can you get tracking, insurance, etc., etc. etc. All of those are important, and I may go into them another time, but today I want to talk about how to pack your books, what it is that you actually ship them in.

As with most things, you have a number of choices when it comes to packing your books. You can go quick and dirty (and cheap!) all the way up to having dedicated machinery for just that purpose. There are a few different factors to consider when selecting the method that’s right for you, including its cost, the image it projects and how well it will actually protect the books.

Brown Paper Bags
It was good enough to cover your 5th grade history textbook, so shouldn’t it be good enough to cover the books you send across the country? Well, maybe not. While brown paper bags do have the advantages of being cheap and/or free and readily available, you should think about the fact that it may not create the greatest image of you in the mind of your customer. Even if a paper-wrapped book gets to the customer in pristine condition (which it might not) the cheap wrapping could have a conscious or unconscious effect on how the customer views you, which in turn affects how they rate you. If you are running your own site, it also can affect whether they will give you repeat business or recommend you to others.

Manila Envelopes
They cost less than properly padded shipping envelopes, and they look better than cut up grocery bags, but they still have their drawbacks. For one thing, they aren’t going to do a super job of protecting the book. Also, just because they are higher on the totem pole than brown paper doesn’t mean they’re going to do a great job of meeting your customers’ expectations.

Kraft® Bubble Mailers
Kraft® mailers are made for the job, and if you’re only sending a book or two, they’re one of your best bets. They have a moderate cost, but they will protect the books, and will meet customer expectations. The one major drawback is that, as I’ve discussed before, because they are made of both paper and plastic they cannot be recycled. Paper recyclers consider them contaminated with plastic and vice versa. That’s why there’s . . .

Poly Bubble Mailers
Poly bubble mailers are made of 100% recyclable plastics. You can get all the benefits of Kraft® mailers, often at a lower cost, and at the same time know you are helping the environment. That’s why I chose to sell poly mailers to help support SellBooksBlog. To learn more, click the ad on the right or just go here.

Cardboard Boxes
Boxes have a higher cost, but when you have many books (a set for instance), or books that are particularly large or heavy, sometimes a bubble mailer just won’t do. Again, using a cardboard box will protect your books, while at the same time meeting customer expectations, and appearing perfectly professional.

There are other options out there too, but these are just some of the most common ways that people pack and ship the books they sell online. What about you? How do you ship your books? Let me know in the comments section.

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.

The first bookseller has really benefited from having a sales rank based strategy. He would buy anything she could make money on that had a sales rank under 100,000. If he could buy a book for a quarter and sell it for $1.50, he’d buy it. He was very aware of exactly what he was adding to his inventory, and his strategy was heavily based on sales rank, along with the ability to make money on a given book. It worked well for him. He had a very fast inventory turn. He didn’t have more than a couple thousand books at a time, and he’d sell a couple thousand books a month, meaning he turned his entire inventory about once a month.

The second bookseller also had a sales rank strategy. She would buy books with sales ranks under 250,000, where she could make money. She was more aggressive in buying books with a higher sales rank (slower selling books) than the first seller. Nevertheless, she did take sales rank into account. Her inventory level would hover between 1,000 and 1,500 books and had a 60-90 day inventory, meaning she turned her whole inventory every two to three months.

Then there’s the third seller. This guy has no buying strategy. At all. He doesn’t take sales rank into consideration, and he wonders why he has a lot of dead inventory. He also doesn’t want to cull, and so he’s stuck with a bunch of books that are never going to sell. He hasn’t taken my advice and gotten rid of them. He’s stubborn and doesn’t want to take a loss on anything he’s bought. Between not having a buying strategy and refusing to cull, his dead inventory is really weighing him down. No surprise, his business is doing horribly. The last time I talked to him he said that he had sold 5 books the day before.

Are you starting to get the picture? Having a solid buying strategy has a huge impact on your ability to make a profit. Which of the three booksellers do you want to be? Do yourself a favor, and figure out how sale rank to benefit you. Iif you don’t already use it to determine what you buy, now would be a great time to start.

It’s time to talk once more about the possible pitfalls and perils of selling on Amazon.

Admittedly, selling on Amazon can be time consuming and even frustrating. If you are a casual seller with a few books rather than a professional you might be better off figuring out how to sell your books online the easy way.

I know we’ve covered this before in various ways, but this time I’m not talking about myself. There is a colleague of mine, another bookseller who’s about a quarter my size. He sells around a couple hundred books a day.

At least he did, until he recently got his account suspended by Amazon.

That’s right, it happened. The thing we all dread – suspension. He told me that he was advised in the morning that he needed to get the situation rectified, and by that same evening his account had been suspended.

He knows why it happened. He simply hadn’t been doing what he was supposed to be doing. He had been shipping books late, he didn’t have good customer service, and he didn’t reply customer inquiries in anything approaching a timely manner, if at all. Amazon, of course, doesn’t take too kindly to this type of bad behavior.

So, he got suspended for one week. He is actually supposed to get his account unsuspended by today sometime, after having prostrated himself and pleaded with Amazon. He has been selling on Amazon for five years now. That actually may have given him some equity, the fact that he had been selling on the marketplace for a while and had that history.

That doesn’t mean that he’s getting a free pass. He know he needs to fix these issues, and that he needs to straighten up and fly right or he’s going to end up banned for life.

This whole situation has hugely affected business over last week, in that over the last week he hasn’t done any business at all. He doesn’t sell other marketplaces, so an Amazon suspension was about the worst news he could get.

The thing is, this whole situation could have been avoided if he had only been doing what he was supposed to be doing in the first place. This is just one more illustration of what I have been saying: you really have to stay on the straight and narrow when it comes to Amazon. If you’re not doing what you’re supposed to, they will find out, they will call you on it, and they will penalize you. Just use common sense, follow the rules, and try and provide a basic level of good customer service, just like you would in any other business.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading the blog, especially those of you who have left comments. This isn’t the end of SellBooksBlog, just the beginning of a new phase. In the meantime, if you’re starved for nuggets of bookselling knowledge, feel free to browse the archives.

For those rock-dwellers out there, the kindle is Amazon’s handheld device for reading e-books and other electronic media. Since the original Kindle came out in late 2007, two new versions, the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX, have already been released.

The Kindle isn’t the first attempt to replace paper books with digital counterparts, but it has certainly been the most talked-about and the most successful. Amazon has even developed a “Kindle for iPhone” app.

So should we all be looking for a new line of work? Is the paper book destined to go the way of the dodo? Will the Kindle kill the used book business?

No.

The first video ever broadcast on MTV, way back in 1981, was a song called “Video killed the Radio Star”. Only it didn’t. Turn on your radio and you’ll still find news, music, politics, advice and more up and down the dial. Video may have killed radio serials like The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet, but that’s about it.

The same principle holds true for the Kindle. Sure it may absorb part of the reading market, but what part do you think that will be?

I’ts going to be the casual buyers who read for entertainment. In other words, mass-market paperbacks, the books that aren’t worth trying to resell anyway. Buyers looking for specific non-fiction, textbooks, modern first editions and most of the other kinds of books you can actually make money on will still be in demand.

Besides that, the Kindle is still way too expensive to gain wide adoption. The Kindle DX sells for $489.00. That’s almost five hundred dollars! Way too much for most people to shell out, especially in this economy. Those who can just drop that kind of money on it are going to be those who are pretty well off, and were probably never looking for deals on used books in the first place.

There’s also a bunch of technical issues that Amazon is going to have to iron out. For one thing, the light text and poor contrast ratio on the Kindle 2 have led to complaints of eye strain and headaches. This is really a developing technology sector. Who knows how long it will take to fine tune the concept to fit the needs of the average consumer. The Kindle may be the clunky, expensive Laserdisc to the streamlined and affordable dvd and blu-ray formats of future digital books.

The bottom line is that books aren’t going anywhere any times soon, especially used books, and especially the kind of used books that you really want to be selling in the first place. So don’t go filling out employment applications at Starbucks just yet. After all, if video killed the radio star, why doesn’t MTV ever play music videos anymore?

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UPDATE:

Here’s a site worth checking out. Their name pretty much says it all, it’s a site where you can sell used books: sellusedbooks.com

The USPS’s woes stem from a number of factors. The continued encroachment of the internet on mail’s traditional role in communication is still impacting the volume of mail that’s sent each year. In addition, the economic crisis hit industries like real estate, which usually accounts for a pretty high volume of direct mail, harder than most.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Postal Service “reported a nearly $2 billion loss for the second quarter ended March 31, with mail volume down nearly 15% from the year before”. According to a statement released by the Post Office itself in February, if current trends continue, “the Postal Service could experience a year-end net loss significantly higher than last year’s $2.8 billion loss”.

So what does all this mean for us as humble sellers of books?

Expect the Post Office to raise rates every six months.

You heard me. Not every year or every couple of years. Every six months. Retail rates went up again in May, for the third May in a row, as a matter of fact. The current system allows annual increases as long as those increases don’t exceed the rate of inflation for the year before.

Got that?

Basically, they are already set up to raise prices every year. However between 1st class, media mail, and all the different rates that affect us as booksellers, we’ve actually seen three postal rate increases over the last fifteen months. They raised them in May 2008, January 2009 and again in May 2009.

I’m going to put on my Nostradamus hat here for a minute and predict that postal rates will go up again in Jan 2010.

The Post Office raising rates this often is going to be a norm we’re all going to have to get used to. The WSJ article quotes Postmaster General John Potter that even if the economy improves “We know all the mail volume won’t bounce back”. With no relief in sight, Potter says that “Every option has to be on the table.”

“Every option” includes a few radical ideas, including a proposal to end Saturday mail delivery, but mostly I think it’s going to mean rate increases.

Shipping is one of the highest expenses a bookseller faces. There’s just no avoiding it. It’s important to keep track of what’s going on in industries, like shipping, that directly affect our bottom line. At least then you can give yourself as much time as possible to prepare for changes, to change your methods, strategies or budgeting accordingly.

I know it’s not what you want to hear. As I mentioned before, selling books is a game of nickels, dimes and pennies. I’m not looking forward to more of that change adding up to higher shipping costs any more than you are. But it’s already starting to happen, and it looks like it’s only going to get worse.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. MapQuest 4 Mobile

When you’re out scouting it’s important to be able to figure out where the heck you are going. Whether you’re exploring new areas beyond your usual stomping ground just trying to get home again, this app can be a real lifesaver.

2. Quickoffice

One of the greatest things of having a device as powerful and versatile as the iPhone is that it frees you from being tied down to your computer. With this app you can view and edit your files right from your iPhone with Microsoft Word and Excel functionality.

3. Facebook

Keep in touch with your friends, family and other contacts on the go. Who knows, maybe one of them is just dying to tell you about the garage full of used books they just inherited.

4. Gmail

Just another way to keep in communication no matter where you go.

5. GasBuddy

Every expense affects your overall profit – including gas. With this app you can find the lowest price gasoline and keep fuel costs from burning a hole in your bottom line.

6 Evernote

Never forget anything again with this great app that allows you to take pictures, record voice notes and basically record anything important that you want to remember later. It even scans images and recognizes the words in them so you can search for them later.

7. Google Sync

Keep track of your Google contacts and Google Calendar, anywhere any time.

8. YouTube

Just because you have some downtime or have to wait somewhere for a while doesn’t mean you have to be bored. With YouTube on your iPhone you have millions of videos at your fingertips to entertain you. Better yet, you can check out one of the countless educational videos on the site and learn something.

9. iSpend

With iSpend you can keep track of all your expenses, categorize them and even generate reports that you can export to Excel.

10. Tetris

Because you always need Tetris. Always.

In this case, the violation had to do with my confirmation emails. I am in the practice of sending out an email whenever I ship a book, just to let the customer know that their books are on their way. It’s good customer service and doesn’t take much time once you develop a boilerplate message to send out. The issue was that in the signature of my email was the URL of my own website.

Now, these emails are only sent after the transaction is complete. I would never try and divert a customer from buying a book I had listed on Amazon to buy it from my own site instead. That is pretty much Amazon’s cardinal sin and if you get caught doing it, you can pretty much expect instant expulsion. The way I justified what I was doing was that the customer had already bought the book and Amazon had already got their cut. What was wrong with letting the customer know I also had an independent site after the sale was complete?

A lot.

You might think that what goes on between you and the customer is none of Amazon’s business. After all, their Participation Agreement makes Amazon’s role pretty clear:

“Amazon provides a platform for third-party sellers (”Sellers”) and buyers (”Buyers”) to negotiate and complete transactions. Amazon is not involved in the actual transaction between Sellers and Buyers and is not the agent of and has no authority for either for any purpose.”

You might think that but you’d be wrong. Here’s the thing, you’re entitled to interpret Amazon’s policies any way you want, but they have their own interpretation. Only one of the two interpretations counts. Guess which one? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not yours.

Amazon’s interpretation of their rules is that at no point during the process, before, during or after the sale, can you do anything that might be seen as diverting customers away from Amazon to somewhere else, such as your own site. I could have argued my point, tried to fight them on it.

But I didn’t.

Whether you’re right, wrong or indifferent, it does not pay to get cute with Amazon. If you are ever contacted by them regarding a violation, I highly recommend you do exactly what I did.

First of all, I stopped doing it. No more URLs in the emails.

Second, I spoke to someone at Amazon on the phone to confirm that I was now in compliance with their policies and standards. Amazon has a feature in their help section where you can request to have someone call you. It works like a charm.

Finally, after I got off the phone I sent an email to Amazon in which I referenced the phone call. I suggest you always call AND email, that way if there is discrepancy later on, you have some kind of record of the resolution of the issue.

Don’t try to take on Amazon. They will win. Play by the rules, and if they call you on something, fix it and then make absolutely sure they know you fixed it. Do that and everybody wins, and everybody gets to keep making money, including you.