(given to me by a professional book seller, I did not write this!) posted by Anita Sands Hernandez
1.) KNOW HOW TO FIND BOOKS. Hit the garage sales and mom and pop thrifts. Stay away from GOOD WILL, they charge 4$ for a paperback. THEY ARE NUTS. Concentrate on famous. Grisham, Forsyth, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Vince Flynn. And historical Arnold Toynbee, Will Durant.
A favored spot online is booksalefinder.com. It lists mosts of the library sales in an area. It's FREE, and wonderful to go to. I also found out that at some libraries the books that don't sell are PUT OUT the next day for anyone to get! Wear saddle bags into the library or wear your ten children!
Besides doing your PRICING at ABE BOOKS, to see how MUCH you can get for it, another site you might like to price books is directtextbook.com. Any book can be put in and priced through about thirty sites on this search engine.
Go to senior centers and tell the ole geezers, 'let me buy your used books, I'll come over, you won't have to handle them, I'll dust while I go thru them, what I don't buy will be cleaner and I'll bring the cookies, you make the tea. SENIOR centers are so great. Coffee, baked goods, book rooms. Love em. Regular adults should have something similar!
2) CONNECT WITH THE BIG BOYS - I have to be honest. Abebooks doesn't sell so very well any more and it costs you l00$ a month (at that time, who knows now?) It's been bought out by Amazon, but is still a separate entity. It DOES, however, take Uncorrected Proofs and Advanced Reading Copies, which is about the only reason I stay with them." (NOTE. Wonder what those are! Publishing industry stuff.)
Alibris does very well as it is partners with Barnes & Noble, Half.com, eBay.com, Borders, and several others. It also has the lowest shipping fees of any of them.
Amazon is still No. 1, although I think many people don't like it as much as they did. It now takes things other than books, like toys, games, electronics, etc., on a smaller scale than eBay, but similarly.
3.) BUY THE GOOD STUFF. KNOW BOOKS. I believe that the ability to pick out books is a necessity in the book business. But I've also found that penny romances and suspense from eBay in bulk sell well, too-- they just don't have the profit of a carefully chosen item. So my literary tastes must be shoved out the window at times, in favor of PUBLIC tastes.
4.) ALLOW FOR MIRACLES. I have a SIGNED autobiography of Hitler's
architect,
written by Albert Speer, in German and how could he have signed that?
He was in jail for
4 decades after the War, though he DID get out...and that's when he
published so it's rare.
Believe it or not, I picked it up at a library sale for a buck. I think
I've got it on my site
for $200-$300. Probably very cheap at that price.
(She should carry it to Berlin or Zurich and sell it to a rare book
dealer, for EUROS!)
It always amazes me the stuff that people give to library sales from
estates they've inherited.
Read the mysteries of JOHN DUNNING where his hero, a used book seller,
fills us in
on the book trade and those rare, impossible finds that are like diamonds
found in the mud.
Last year, a woman sold a bunch of great ethnic cookbooks she FOUND in a house they bought as part of an estate. Wow, did they go well! I just sold a tiny paperback autobiography in an eBay shipment for $50. Desi Arnaz. Go figure anybody would want that!
Bookselling is so much fun! I just wish I had the free cash to get more
inventory. Eventually I want to build up to 18000 titles online. I have
seen my sales go down recently due to the economy. Normally I sell .2%
(.002)
pretty steadily, with upswings to .4%+ around Christmas. Now I'm down
to .1% to .15% of average daily inventory (6500 titles means 6-10 sales
daily instead of 11-13).
WHY BOOK SELLING IS HARDER THAN BEFORE
When Amazon.com went with the free shipping the business went from GREAT
$4000.00 per month with 3000 books to 1300.00 per month with 15000
books. Quite frankly, the business, for me, is ruined. It takes a whole
lot of time, energy and space to make any money. I just got sick of
the
4 out of 5's with the message of wonderful transaction, got the book
in
2 days! Exactly as described! I also got sick of people trying to scam
me out of books and money. I have tried and feel I have more
than complied. I am fed up with them taking such a big chunk of the
money.
I average $1 a book after vendor service and postage expenses. Amazon
is
the worst at a minimum of $1.76 per book. I won't loose that much and
some of it will be picked up by other services when people have to
find
my book that they need somewhere other than amazon
I am doing so much better in Mary Kay. I LOVE MARY KAY!
I have been working this business for 7 weeks and on January
1st I am going for my directorship. I am having so much fun and am
no
longer stuck to the computer with the most ungrateful jerks leaving
little nasty gems for me. It is such a positive experience, with Mary
Kay. I am thriving! Last week I made 529.00 in 1 hour!:^) Happy! Happy!
Joy! Joy! ( I SHOULD HAVE EDITED THAT OUT! MAKE-up is for ditzes
and high priced make-up is for double ditzes! Don't want to hang out
THERE.)
I ASKED ANOTHER VENDOR: You said AMAZON Was good for you and
I sent him the earlier vendor's text. He answered: Amazon takes the
same from
everyone, so does the post office. This vendor is saying that she only
makes
a 75-100% profit and she can't make a living with this margin. Ptoooey.
Keep in mind this is his worse case profit scenario.
Give up on Amazon and your book biz will die within months.
58% of my sales are on amazon, 22% on Alibris/Barnes & Noble, 14%
on
abe, 5% half.com 1% biblio.com. These figures were taken from today's
color pie chart in my database. (Guy is a genius.) Amazon has penny
books!!!!
Amazon has always had free shipping for orders over $25.00(fact). I
have NEVER had anyone try to scam me out of books or money, not in
the
book world; think about it, book scammers?. I find that 3,000
book listings
will sell approximately 4-5 sales a day maximum or 150-160 books a
month
That vendor would have to AVERAGE $30.00 a book to match
her good day claims. I find the 15,000 stats even less believable.
Obviously she just looked at books as widgets. Without passion what's
the point? Now she has found something she is passionate about, beauty.
MARY KAY. (then PEOPLE you meet are a bit shallow, no? And DUMB
as they pay four times what same stuff costs at the 99c. store)
It appears that vendors are only as good as their reputations but you as a begining bookman will only be as strong as your shelves, so learn how to BUILD THOSE SHELVES
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FOR THE BOOK VENDOR TO DO BETTER BUSINESS
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