Sell Books Blog

In part 1 of this series I talked about the math of selling books for a penny and explained the narrow profit margins that selling penny books may (or may not) make possible. Given the seemingly miserable financial outlook of penny selling, lets take a look at some of the reasons people do it anyway.

First of all there are the books listed for a penny by small, individual sellers.

Some of these are people who just can’t stand to see a perfectly good book recycled into pulp. They knowingly lose money selling their books for a penny, in exchange for the peace of mind of knowing their books have found new homes. While I can appreciate the sentiment, to me selling books is my business, and such an elaborate method of paying to recycle my books just doesn’t make any business sense.

Another group of individual penny sellers are newbies. A lot of people go on Amazon, see a bunch of books listed for a penny and decide they need to list for a penny too. They either don’t know enough about how the process works, or they just don’t do the math, but whatever the reason, they usually learn fairly quickly that they’re actually losing money.

For the big bulk sellers on the other hand, there may be other reasons that penny selling makes sense (and not just cents).

Speaking for myself, I have used penny selling in the past. I don’t right now, but who knows, I might go back to it at some point.

I can’t say for sure what other sellers’ motivation for penny selling is. Some people argue that penny selling is a good way to generate positive feedback. Others are happy with the few cents of profit they make per book. For me, penny selling isn’t about either of those things.

Penny selling makes sense to me as a means to drive people to my own website. It also makes sense when it leads to multiple sales. For example, when someone buys a penny book as well as another book from me. Amazon sends me two shipping fees, and I can ship the two books together, leaving me a more reasonable profit.

Another reason that some larger sellers might use penny selling is as a means of inventory control. As a bookseller, you need to be able to identify and remove books that have no profit potential. If books aren’t going to sell, they’re not only failing to make you money, they are actually costing you money by taking up space in your warehouse, space you are paying for, space which could be used for profitable books. Going through your inventory, pulling and disposing of the books that need to go is sometimes referred to as “culling”. Some sellers may decide that rather than having their employees go through and cull their inventory, it makes more sense to list those books for a penny. The logic is that they might make a small profit, and even if they end up losing a little money on the deal, they would have had to pay anyway, in the form of their employees’ time spent culling their inventory. I don’t subscribe to this theory myself, finding it’s better for running an efficient operation to regularly cull my inventory.

So those are the main reasons people list books for a penny. Have you ever sold penny books? Do you have a reason for doing so other than the ones listed here? Please let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

One of the most common questions new sellers have is “Why are there so many books listed on Amazon for a penny? How can people make money selling books for one cent???”

Well, they can and they can’t. The truth is that when a customer buys a “penny” book, they’re really paying the one cent plus $3.99 shipping. Amazon collects the $4, deducts their fees, and gives the remainder of the shipping fee to the seller to ship the book. Let’s look at an example, just to make things clearer.

Let’s say I list a book for a penny. Joe Blow in Nowheresville, Il purchases it and pays Amazon the $0.01+$3.99

From that $4.00 Amazon deducts $1.35 as a “closing cost” ($4.00-$1.35=$2.65)

I have an Amazon Pro Merchant account and am therefore exempt from Amazon’s usual additional $0.99 fee.

Amazon gives me $2.65

Assuming I can package and ship the book for less than $2.65, I have made a small profit. (Very small, actually. No more than a few cents.)

Expedited and international orders means larger shipping fees are collected, meaning a slightly higher profit margin. Larger sellers can also save even more if they use bulk rate shipping.

It should be noted that even if you are a Pro Merchant and don’t have to pay the .99 fee, it costs $40 a month for the Pro Merchant account. So even if you sell a couple dozen penny books, if your monthly profit doesn’t exceed $40, you’re still losing money on the deal.

Some people go so far as to use improvised packaging materials, shipping their books wrapped in butcher paper, or even cut-up paper grocery bags.

No matter how far people go to try and squeeze a few extra cents out of selling a penny book, the bottom line is that there’s just no profit in it for non-bulk sellers/shippers, and not much profit even if you do deal in bulk.

For this reason, it seems like traditional penny sellers, those who just try and eke out a few cents of profit per book, even they are moving away from literally selling books for a penny.

Still, there are plenty of books listed for a penny. In Part 2 I’ll discuss some of the different reasons books get listed for a penny, both by small, individual sellers and by larger bulk sellers.