Sell Books Blog

As booksellers, most of us use Amazon as a primary (or at least major) channel for selling our books. I’ve talked before about the issue of Amazon and taxes. Amazon’s polices make very clear their dedication to not collecting sales tax for you.

I’ve also warned you about taking on Amazon. Amazon is an 800 lb gorilla, and pretty much nobody is going to make it do anything it doesn’t want to. Some state lawmakers just learned that the hard way.

In an article published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Geoffery A. Fowler reports that Amazon has “ended its business relationships with marketing affiliates in Rhode Island so the online retailer could avoid collecting sales tax in the state.”

Rhode Island, like many other states, is facing a massive budget crisis. One solution that they came up with was to pass a bill requiring any businesses who have online marketing affiliates in the state to collect sales taxes. This isn’t the first state to try this tactic to generate revenue, New York passed a similar law last year.

When North Carolina seemed poised to do the same last week, Amazon cut its ties to all of its North Carolina affiliates. The same thing happened yesterday with Rhode Island affiliates, with Amazon again dropping them before the bill had even been signed into law by the governor.

Now, to be perfectly clear, this doesn’t directly effect us as sellers. Affiliates are businesses who get a Read the rest of this entry »

How can you possibly make $1000 selling books online in just 7 days?

It’s simple. Just find 100 books that you can sell for $10 each.

Still sounds impossible? Here’s a true story:

Back in 1999, I was still working for a high tech company, but I was already involved in selling online in my free time. Back then, Craigslist wasn’t really as well known, and I used to find a lot of great stuff there to resell on Ebay.

One particular time, I had just acquired 25 books from a craigslist posting, when I got a very interesting email. It was one of your standard spammy-type emails, you know the kind, it said something like ““make x number of dollars by selling the items you’ve purchased from Amazon.” That email was what first led me to Read the rest of this entry »

Buying your used books from library sales is a great way to find books to sell online. While you and I and all the other booksellers are profiting from the books we find at library sales, it’s easy to forget that with every book you buy there, you’re also supporting a good cause.

I get reminded about that fact from time to time, especially when I read an article like the one that recently ran in Wisconsin in the Superior Telegram. In the article, Janet Jennings reports that the local Friends of the Library group has donated a walker with a book basket attached to the library. The walker will help “those that need some assistance with fetching their own books, but have difficulty holding them.”

Library sales support libraries. A cynical way of looking at libraries is that they are giving away for free the very thing we sell to make our living. But in reality, there’s no Read the rest of this entry »

As I discussed in parts 1 and 2, auto repricing is something you need to be aware of if you’re serious about selling books. Repricing can be done in different ways, but one of the ways I used to employ it is no longer an option thanks to something called consolidated SKUs.

Once upon a time, if you had multiple copies of a book you had a choice in how you listed them. A lot of sellers would individually list each copy of a book under individual SKUs. These were books with the same ISBN, same condition, everything. Back then, Amazon tolerated these kinds of seller’s listing practices.

The problem was that this led to large volume sellers practicing what’s called “page hogging”. They would list dozens of same title at a really low price so that all the buyer would see would be that particular seller’s books.

About 3 yrs ago, around 2006 Amazon started cracking down and really began enforcing the consolidating listings. Books with the same ISBN and condition now have to be consolidated into a single SKU.

That’s all well and good, but the issue, as far as repricing goes, is that consolidating the listings means that we can’t effectively age our inventory.

I used to use the age of my inventory extensively in setting up my repricing. New books would have one rule, and never be listed Read the rest of this entry »

Book selling is not unlike selling in any other market: price matters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who believes you have to always have the lowest price on every book. However, in a market where prices and demand are constantly shifting and fluctuating, you do need to know where you stand in relation to the prices that other sellers are offering. If you don’t auto reprice or manually reprice in today’s online bookselling market, especially on Amazon,
it will definitely reduce your possibilities for selling your books.

There are a certain number of buyers who will buy from me based on my Amazon rating and size. I sell books that are definitely not the lowest price, books that some sell as penny books that I list for .99, 1.99, 2.99.There are buyers who seek out sellers based on feedback. However, these buyers are in the minority, and I can’t base business model on them.
There are just buyers just don’t consider anything but the price.

It’s all about knowing and taking advantage of strategies and tactics that will benefit you. As a large volume seller I’ve automated many parts of business. It saves on labor and lowers my costs. Part of that automation includes using auto repricing.

When I was working at a smaller volume I could afford to not play the repricing game. Having become large volume seller of low margin product, this is game that large volume sellers are in. Don’t think that it hasn’t crossed my mind to go back to being a Read the rest of this entry »

If you are new to bookselling, you may not be aware of one of the most valuable tools available to you to help you sell books: auto repricing.

Basically, auto repricing is done through applications which are hosted either on your desktop or remotely on the web. You set up rules for a group of listings, and the software automatically reprices your listing based on listings by other sellers. For instance, you can set it to take the lowest price for a book and either do a price match, set the price slightly higher than that price, etc. Some sellers even set the rules to set the price lower than their lowest competitor but that, in my humble opinion, is just plain stupid. You can also set up more advanced rules, for example, you can set them up to base the reprice off of the third lowest price, rather than the lowest, or set them to match condition, etc.

I’ve used a few different repricing applications over the years. There’s some overlap with the companies I talked about in the Read the rest of this entry »

Selling used college textbooks is a major segment of online bookselling. If you deal in used textbooks you may have noticed that a growing number of them proudly proclaim that they are made from “100% recycled materials”. Does this mean that the textbook industry is becoming “green”?

Hardly.

In reality Textbook publishers are among the least “green” in the book business. Their business model is predicated on churning out “new” editions of each book just about every year, resulting in massive amounts of waste.

Why does every textbook need a new edition every year? Has the Pythagorean Theorem changed since last year? What about the atomic weight of hydrogen? Did the bombing of Pearl Harbor happen on a different year than previously thought?

Of course not.

And yet textbook publishers roll out a batch of brand new editions each and every year.

The sad truth is that textbooks are a multi-billion dollar business dominated by only a handful of publishers. Those publishers Read the rest of this entry »

These days, book selling can be a game of nickels, dimes and pennies. The difference of a few cents should matter to you, because all that is all it takes to see your margins skewered. Books are selling for less, and costing more.

We’ve seen three postal rate increases, in May 2008, January 2009 and May 2009, with no change in Amazon’s shipping rates. We still get only $2.65 to cover cost of shipping, which includes :

• Postage
• Tracking
• Shipping materials

All together, shipping can actually cost you:

• $2.78 for 1 lb
• $2.77 for 2 lbs
• $3.16 for 3 lbs

Are you beginning to see the problem?

I sell 1000 books per day. My main challenge is postage. With all the rate increases on the commercial side, we’ve seen rates go Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I laid out a few good sources for finding used books to sell online. While library sales, thrift stores, etc are good resources, the truth is that I can’t tell you where you’re going to find books. Books are all around us. They are on shelves and in drawers, forgotten in attics and garages, and boxed up in storage units. I can’t tell you when you’re going to find books.

Finding books, to a certain degree, is about who you know. Just about everyone you know is a potential source of books.
I have known neighbors, past co-workers, teachers, relatives, people from all walks of life who have turned out to be unexpectedly good sources of books. You might know someone looking to pare down their collection, someone who’s job gives them access to used books, or someone who’s inherited books they don’t know what to do with. Use your existing network, talk to the people in your life, and you just might be surprised where you find books.

I once met some people at the Penske truck rental counter. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, but we got to talking and I ended up finding out that they had some books they wanted to get rid of. As it turned out, they didn’t have a lot of books, but the books they did have were valuable.

If you take the time to talk to people, you can find and get to know the people who have the books, and find the books that the people you already know have. This can be a valuable thing indeed.

Everybody remembers their first time. The nerves, the uncertainty, the thrill.

I’m talking about selling your first book online, of course. What did you think?

For me, it was a book called “Inheritance of Coat Colour in Dogs” that I picked up for 25¢. I turned around and sold it on Ebay for $44. This was back in 1999. Of course the guy who bought it from me was a book seller himself, and re-listed it almost immediately for double what he’d paid me. But hey, I was just a newbie back then. Live and learn right?

There’s a less rare version with an Americanized “color” spelling, but the only copy of the exact book that I could track down with a quick internet search is currently listed on AbeBooks for $360.

This wasn’t technically the first the first book I’d ever sold online. I had sold some of my personal books before, but I consider this one my “first” because it was the first one I had bought specifically because I thought I could make a profit selling it online.

What about you? Do you remember your first time? How did you lose your bookselling “virginity”?