Of all the possible issues in determining how well you might do in selling used books online, none is more critical than your ability to acquire uncommon, desirable books in very good condition. Not surprisingly, many sellers closely guard information about their sources of books, but the reality is that there is a great deal of information generally available on the subject and we are not giving away any deep dark secrets by pointing you in a few directions. The easy answer to the question “where do you find the books to sell?” does not provide much information, and yet it is telling: “Anywhere you can find them!”
As online bookseller Craig Stark proclaims in his excellent series on online bookselling in the AuctionBytes newsletter (www.auctionbytes.com), “Books are everywhere!”
Don’t be too proud to search out some of the places enumerated below, but make some clear rules about the limits you are willing to pay for general stock and the quality of condition that must be met for you to buy a book, and stick to those rules. Here are some suggestions:
Library Sales. Also known as Friends of Library Sales or FOLs, these are held by hundreds of public libraries in every state in the country, and they are the most important single source for many and perhaps most sellers. An FOL sale may include library discards (“ex library” books, in our parlance), but it is also likely to include a wide range of other books donated by library patrons for the benefit of the library. An excellent source of online information about library sales is Book Sale Finder, viewable at www.booksalefinder.com. Not only can you click on any state to get all the details on upcoming sales, but you can also sign up for “Sale Mail” and they’ll send you a weekly email message with information on all sales within a specified radius of your (or any) location. Book Sale Finder also has several other services available including classified ads where you can list books for sale or items wanted.
While you are likely to get the biggest bumps in good inventory from the special occasion or regular monthly library sales you’ll see listed by Book Sale Finder, you’ll also help yourself out in the long run by identifying and regularly dropping in on the best “perpetual” library sales in your immediate area: libraries that put some of their donated books and/or discards out on the for-sale shelves on a more or less daily basis. It never hurts to make friends with the folks who staff or volunteer at these sales. While library staff have been known occasionally to show disdain for resellers by distinguishing them from “real readers”, most people associated with library sales realize not only that that online resellers are the best thing that has ever happened to library book sales, but also that resellers shorten the process of getting books into the hands of the readers who really want them. In some cases I’ve found that cordial relationship with book sale volunteers has paid off with important information: “we’ll be putting out a couple boxes of new things at about four o’clock Thursday afternoon.”
Yard sales and garage sales are a fun way to spend time on weekend mornings, exploring nearby neighborhoods and exploiting a ready supply of books at bargain prices. You’ll want to maintain your high standards for book quality while exercising your best bargaining skills to help the yard-salers see the benefit of saying goodbye to a larger quantity of books at a lower average price than what they tell you as walk up. Never be afraid to make an offer! I should point out here that I owe everything I am as a yard sale bargain hunter to my wife and her mother, who were filling their lives (along with their closets, attics, basements, and the trunks of their cars) with the fruits of their Saturday morning expeditions long before they knew me. I tended to refrain from and even perhaps disdain such activity until I began selling used books online, and now it has become one of the staple activities of our marriage.
Phantom yard sales. What are these? Well, I could have called this paragraph dumpster diving, but I didn’t want the elegance of this volume to suffer. Yesterday morning my wife got a call from a friend who lives a mile away. Her husband had just returned from a walk and noticed that a lot of books and other items, all seemingly in good condition, were packed up in front of a nearby home awaiting the weekly trash collection. My wife and three-year-old son and I were in the van 15 minutes later, and we returned another 30 minutes later, all having done quite well. Danny was very pleased, reaping a non-motorized scooter made by Honda and a Near Fine “Flexible Flyer” sled with only the slightest edge wear from gentle sledding, but I believe I did best of all, netting over 200 books, most of them in very good shape and most of them in the uncommon or scarce category, all for the price of 20 cents worth of gasoline and my time. It’s not the first time I have happened upon such treasures, and certainly underscores the value of letting friends, family, and acquaintances know what we do so they can help scout for us. I have yet to get to the point where I drive the weekly trash routes in my town just after dawn, but if I were to suffer an inventory dearth I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.
Flea markets often have large book tables with good selections of hardcovers and paperbacks, but beware of getting into large collections of overstock or remaindered books that flea-market sellers may have purchased from jobbers directly for resale; these are often the titles that will swamp the online marketplace as well, so that you won’t be able to sell them at a decent price. When you do see material that you want to buy, once again, don’t be afraid to make a bargaining offer.
Thrift shops. Many thrift shops feature regular or perpetual sales along the lines of $5 for everything you can pack into a shopping bag, although sellers have noted a more recent trend toward higher thrift shop prices. This may well turn out to be a short-lived trend if market forces prevail, since sellers are unlikely to keep buying their inventory from any store if the prices make it unprofitable. Some of the best thrift shop sales we’ve found are not at the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, but at the little church or hospital thrift shops that are open two days a week from 10 to 1. It makes sense to develop a list of these kinds of opportunity so you can keep coming back to them. Otherwise you’ll be amazed at how many details you can forget! Or maybe that’s just me.
Your personal library. A great many online booksellers are just selling books they originally purchased for their own use. Sometimes entrepreneurial sellers develop resentment toward these personal library sellers for silly things like not charging enough for their books, but it is worth remembering that these folks are also buyers, and whatever their “business practices,” they play an important role both in building the overall marketplace and also in keeping the new book market fluid and its prices high, which at some level are important elements in maintaining a strong market for used books.
In any case, if you are the book lover that you ought to be if you are in this line of work, your personal library probably contains some good books, in very good condition, that would bring a nice price online. Some are books that you would never want to sell, but with others, keep two things in mind: first, you are going to be acquiring books by the hundreds every month that you are involved in this enterprise; and second, unless you are living either on a farm or at a more stratified economic level than most of us, you will eventually have to make some tough decisions about shelf space.
Other online used book dealers. If you have interest in the rare and antiquarian end of the used bookselling spectrum, I recommend that you become a member of The Bibliophile Mailing List (www.bibliophilegroup.com), a wonderful treasure trove that is maintained by Oregon bookseller Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson (www.bibliophilegroup.com/lynnsbookstore) for the benefit of sellers and/or collectors of rare, out-of-print, scarce books in all subject areas. Its subscribers include booksellers, librarians, students, scholars, and book lovers of all kinds. Participants will find books offered from a few dollars to many thousands of dollars. You will often find the pricing rather rich for almost anyone’s blood, but there are occasional bargains and those doing the offerings include some of the most knowledgeable and experience booksellers anywhere. To subscribe to the Bibliophile Mailing List, send email to biblio-request@bibliophilegroup.com and put "subscribe" (without the quotes) in the body of your letter. At this writing there are dues of $30 per year.
Road trips. One of the true joys of being a used bookseller is the ability to plan trips to places near and far around your book acquisition efforts. If you plan your trip well, you’ll be able to begin it with an itinerary of book sales and used bookstores that you can augment by keeping an eye out for thrift shops and other spots along the way, and end it by recording, documenting, and organizing the expenses deductions you’ll be able to share with your Uncle Samuel come tax time.
Bookstores. Scout out all the used bookstores within a reasonable radius and decide which ones are worth stopping in on once a week, once a month, or once a year. While it is generally true that a retailer does not want to pay the prices implicit in acquiring most of his stock from other retailers, there are exceptions that are worth noting here. If a brick-and-mortar used bookshop does not sell online, there will usually be pricing discrepancies between its inventory and the normal range of online pricing, and as you gain experience and develop your ability to locate books that will fetch nice prices online, you will likely find that some of these volumes are occasionally hidden, and available on the cheap, in the darker recesses and back shelves of some used bookshops.
Even if a brick and mortar shop does sell online, the duties of maintaining a physical store and serving walk-in buyers and sellers are often very time-consuming and many such stores, because of the claims on staff time, have only gotten around to listing a small percentage of books online. In any case, the kind of treasure you may often find at a bargain price at such a store may be the out-of-place local interest book: for instance, Ruth Lee Webb’s Sandwich Glass: The History of the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company will not last long if properly displayed in a Cape Cod bookshop, and always fetches anywhere from $20 to $150 depending on edition and condition if listed properly online, but if it turns up in a strictly brick and mortar bookshop in Milwaukee it may wait a good while before finding a buyer, and may consequently suffer in price and shelving location. So, if you are in Milwaukee, be on the lookout! More generally, wherever you are looking for books, realize that you are not constrained by location and gather up any cheaply priced volume that is likely to be desirable and scarce in nearly any village on the planet, because the miracles of modern science now allow you to open a bookshop simultaneously in nearly every village on the planet!
If, God forbid, you are at all like me and many of our bookselling colleagues, you probably enjoyed spending time in used bookshops long before you began selling, and it only makes sense to continue to indulge that pleasure now that you will also be making some purchases for resale. One difference between “now and then,” of course, is that these days I usually enter a used bookstore with a small box of books “for trade” – items that for one reason and another I am not going to list online myself, but which I suspect will be staples for a brick and mortar shop – so that the likelihood of dispensing any actual folding money or leaving the store with a lightened wallet is greatly diminished. One thing to watch out for: a brick and mortar shop’s “outdoor bargain” shelf or table may give you more than you bargained for if it is unprotected from the elements, because the ravages of dampness and critters (I believe that is the proper scientific term) are not always visible to the naked eye.
Half.com. Far more than Amazon.com, Half.com has experienced seller saturation without a concomitant influx of buyers, despite the fact that it is owned by eBay, one of the two largest e-commerce sites in the world. Early in its brief history Half.com imposed a price minimum of 75 cents for booksellers, so the result is that there are thousands of titles available for 75 cents, many of them described by their sellers as being in “Very Good” or “Like New” condition. Half.com charges its buyers far less than Amazon.com for shipping and handling, and consequently at this writing one can pick up any of these thousands of 75-cent titles for a total expenditure of $3.05. While it is true that I almost never pay as much as $3.05 for stock, there are a couple of situations which occasionally send me to Half.com for a book.
First, like every other volume seller online, I have occasionally experienced the embarrassment of selling a book from my listed online inventory only to find, when I go into the “pick and pack” mode, that the book is no longer there or is no longer in saleable condition. Maybe I gave it to one of my daughters and failed to delete its listing, maybe I managed somehow to list it twice by making a spreadsheet error, maybe I sold it on one venue and could not update my stock because of another venue’s maintenance problems (yes, colleagues, I am being discreet here), maybe I tucked a paperback too tightly onto a shelf so that a cover became newly damaged, or, and I’m not saying this could ever happen, maybe my inventory organization needs a little attention. The first thing I do if I cannot ship a copy from stock is to check Half.com to see if there is a suitable copy from a highly rated seller available there. If so, I have it drop-shipped to my customer and I send the customer a brief explanation of what to expect. The customer has a good buying experience (I have done this perhaps 15 times in the past four years without a single complaint), and I still have a profitable transaction.
The other thing that I often do with Half.com is to check its pricing and availability for a title either when I list the title elsewhere or when I sell it from another venue. I have frequently found instances where it will make sense to replenish my stock from Half.com, although one would expect the potential for this kind of arbitrage profit to continue to diminish as the world of online bookselling becomes more and more populous and, one would think, more and more transparent. But a regular instance of this keeps occurring with the 1970s and 1980s self-help best-seller Love and Addiction by Archie Brodsky and Stanton Peele, which always seems to have very good copies available at Half.com for under a dollar while it continues to have a lowest available price of $7 to $8 at Amazon’s Marketplace. I don’t have any idea why this is true, but I am happy to assist in the process of making the market more efficient by buying copies at Half.com and selling them on Amazon. The key, of course, is to make sure you enter the transaction with a quality copy, a trustworthy seller, and sound arithmetic.
Since we are practically on the subject here anyway, this seems the right place to venture into the swampland of what many of our Amazon colleagues refer to as “drop-ship scams.” If you peruse the listings very long in Amazon’s Marketplace, you are likely to find a great many listings at wildly inflated prices by a few “sellers” who apparently do not actually stock many of their listed books themselves. You will often find that their storefronts contain somewhat confusing and convoluted references to “consignment”, and if you read through their customer feedback files you will often find many references to titles that were not available, not shipped, not the edition ordered, or drop-shipped from another seller. The overall customer feedback rating is likely to be much lower than the average seller’s rating of 4.6 or 4.7. At least one such seller is, according to the claims of other Amazon Marketplace sellers who have done considerable detective work on the subject, a teenager working out of his bedroom, not even old enough to enter into a binding contract. Whatever he may lack in age and ethics, he appears to compensate for in technical acumen and greed, since he appears to employ some sort of software “bot” which lifts other sellers’ book descriptions verbatim and reprices them 500 per cent or so higher than the pilfered listings. Many sellers have reported receiving drop ship orders from this seller for books that he had listed at several times the market price. It is so difficult to figure out why any buyer would purchase a book for $95, when identical copies are available for $17.50 from sellers with much higher customer feedback ratings, that I have sometimes wondered if something publicly unspecified was included in the transaction. In any case, it is important to note that Amazon requires that a seller must have an item “on hand” at the time he lists it online, so sellers may want to think twice before agreeing to drop-ship their inventory for another seller if they have any reason to question that seller’s business practices.
Estate sales. If you think a good Friends of Library sale is a competitive and cutthroat place, wait until you get to a good estate sale! For many sellers who have moved decisively beyond general stock and into the arena of scarce, rare, and antiquarian book sales, estate sales are their bread and butter, and often their sine qua non. When an affluent and well-read elderly person dies and leaves behind his library of a lifetime, there will often be books of significant value in the estate. For the individual’s heirs or estate liquidators, the process of researching and pricing a large library individually is dauntingly labor-intensive, which often leads to bargain pricing at estate sales. Of course, some estate sales are better than others, and those in college towns are often the best.
If you are going to try to make a living from estate sale acquisitions, plan on arriving early, working in a very efficient and professional way, and weathering a few sharp elbows along the way. Take books off the shelves quickly and get them into a box or basket, then you can take a moment or two to peruse them and see if they make your final cut before actually approaching the cashier to make your purchases. Courtesy is contagious in the long run – sometimes the very long run – so have the good manners to return the other books to the shelves before you cash out.
Before you allow yourself to get totally swept up in a buying frenzy, a word to the wise from an esteemed colleague who employs a straightforward strategy for stretching her bookbuying dollar: “We go to estate sales on Saturday to look around and maybe grab the best of the best, then go back on Sunday and can walk away for at most half the Saturday price. It's win some-lose some, but sometimes it has to be that way.” You can find notices of estate sales in the classified listings of your metropolitan daily and local weekly newspapers, including shoppers’ weekly papers. But don’t stop there. Professional estate liquidators are good at what they do, and they and you have a definite mutual interest in getting to know each other. Keep a file of the contacts you make at sales and in perusing the listings, give them your business card, and begin to build relationships with them. Now and then one of them may come across small collections of books that for one reason or another he does not deem worthy of funneling into a public sale, and you, of course, would like nothing better than to get a call asking you if you would like to look those books over and make an offer.
Estate liquidators also are more and more likely to have an online presence for announcing their sales, marketing their services to potential clients, and providing generic information about estate sales. These sites can be enormously beneficial to you, most of all of course if they actually lead you to some good estate sales. The trick is to search for them online without pulling up every “real estate” listing in the universe, and the solution is to do a search on Google (www.google.com) with this highly complex search phrase: “estate sales -real”. Putting the minus sign before the word “real” will opt you out of most of those real estate listings. Once you’ve looked over a few pages of the results of this search phrase, which just turned up 415,000 entries in 0.16 seconds when I entered it a moment ago, you may want to refine it by adding a geographical descriptor or two.
Special contacts. If you love movies as much as I do and are old enough either to shave or to associate with menfolk who shave other than your parents, you may recall an absolutely wonderful, if painful, scene from Paul Newman’s great performance in The Verdict. Set in a real place, Spencer’s Funeral Home on East Broadway in Southie, Newman’s down and out non-recovering alcoholic gets bounced out of the funeral parlor onto the street for shamelessly working one too many wakes and trying to palm off his business card to the bereaved in hopes of getting some ambulance-chasing cases. Without suggesting that you start attending wakes, I do suggest that – if you really want to pursue rare, scarce, and antiquarian books and you’ve taken to heart the preceding paragraphs on estate sales – you can much more subtly emulate the basic strategy Newman’s character employs. In addition to estate liquidators, the bereaved as a matter of course come into contact with undertakers and with clergy. If you live and work in a small town atmosphere and can find acceptable ways to make yourself and your enterprise known in a lighthanded way to either or both groups in your town, you may find that some day down the road one of them will mention you to a family member who has just offhandedly mentioned the need to get rid of a collection of books. Maybe this will happen, and maybe it won’t, but my hope is that if you consider making these contacts the thought process will help to get you thinking in a more entrepreneurial way about the book acquisition side of your business, and that mode of thinking is the real secret to success.
Advertising for books. If you are regularly checking the newspapers for listings of yard sales and estate sales, you have no doubt noticed an occasional “Cash Paid for Books” advertisement, presumably for one of your competitors. In thinking about whether to place such an ad yourself from time to time, the key determinant is once again based on what kind of inventory you are trying to acquire. If you are trying to stock and sell general stock used books, it is very important to keep your operating costs to a bare minimum, and you should only consider placing an ad if you really have hit the wall in the normal processes of buying your stock at library sales, yard sales, and all of the other types of venues mentioned in this chapter. If that’s the case, give it a try, but pay special attention to finding cheap or even free advertising rates. On the other hand, if you are seeking rare and scarce titles and have established your capacity to market and sell them well, placing such an ad makes great sense. Keep your ad brief and to the point: you have only one agenda in it, not several.
Surplus book jobbers. There are a fair number of book distributors that operate by buying remainder, overstock, or surplus copies in bulk from publishers or large bookstore chains at very low prices and reselling them to booksellers at deep discounts, usually in the 60 to 80 per cent range. My favorite jobber in this category has always been Daedalus Books (www.daedalus-books.com), whose very apt slogan is “Remainders for Readers.” Daedalus has a wonderful selection of remainders – a tad different from what you find at the local “Buck a Book” – and describes itself thus:
“Since 1980 Daedalus Books has been the premier source for bibliophiles looking for quality books at bargain prices. From the thousands of books offered by publishers as remainders every year, we selectively choose books that are of lasting value. Remaindered books are the difference between what a publisher printed and what was sold. Bestsellers, classics, and overlooked gems get remaindered when the remaining stock is larger than the projected future sales. We are devoted to keeping these good books before the reading public. All of our books are hardcover editions (unless noted otherwise), and all are in good condition.”
Daedalus offers booksellers a further 50 per cent discount off its deeply discounted listed prices, provided that the bookseller has a valid tax identification number and orders at least $200 at retail ($100 wholesale) in each order. Bookseller orders are charged actual shipping costs by Daedalus.
There are two problems that one should keep in mind, however, before getting into the business of selling remaindered books.
First, quite frequently there will be a glut in the online market of remaindered editions, and this is more and more likely to occur as the remainder outlets set up shop themselves on Amazon and elsewhere. It’s one thing to wait for prices to stabilize if there are one or two lowballers each offering a single copy at extremely low prices, but it’s another to deal with price competition from a seller who has 50 copies of a title in stock. One can easily research these conditions, of course, but it’s important to be prepared for daily changes.
Second, the price vs. cost structure of your business is likely to be rather different for remaindered books than it is for the books you are picking up at library sales and yard sales for a dollar or less. With Daedalus, for instance, a book with a retail list price of $29.95 may be listed at $7.98, so that a bookseller’s price is $3.99, and you may find that the online price market for the title is around $15 to $18. Sounds great, but remember that you have to pay incoming shipping & handling costs and transaction fees, and then wait for the title to sell. Slow inventory turnover may not seem like much of a problem when you are averaging 40 cents a title purchased from yard sales, but your cash flow can suffer mightily once your costs escalate.
Auctions. Physical, real-world auctions that deal in used and antiquarian books tend to attract experienced dealers who are well equipped to deal with the natural competitive structure of an auction, so the advice here is to proceed with great caution. You may have fun and do well, however, at small-town, out-of-the-way auctions where the buying competition is not so decidedly professional. We are also aware that many online sellers acquire inventory in lots that are being auctioned off on eBay, but please remember that anyone who can sell such a book on eBay can sell it on Half.com or Amazon, so, again, proceed with caution: another seller’s deadwood may become your deadwood. Personally I have heard stories of great success and also of great woe among those who have sought to acquire inventory online. Make sure that you have a good sense of four things:
· wholesale price structure you will need to be profitable;
· exact amount you will charged for shipping and handling;
· condition of books on which you might making a bid; and
· title and edition content and likely desirability of the lot on which you are considering making a bid.
The town dump. Well, we all have our dirty little secrets, don’t we? In certain small New England towns the town dump is the special preserve of the true natives, a place where people gather on Saturday mornings to talk the real talk while the newcomer wannabes gather at Starbucks, and in a few of these towns there’s a little building at the dump where people leave everything from furniture to books to tricycles, for the next guy to pick up if he is interested. I would never let on to my buyers that I was ever interested, because there are some things that I figure people just don’t want to know. But I do know how to get to the dumps in more towns than I should probably admit to, and I also know enough never to go when my sinuses are blocked, because this particular source of used books tends to require special attention to what I will call the “sniff” test.
A Creative Bulletin Board Strategy. Here’s a reward for reading through to (nearly) the end of this chapter: an extremely low-cost method for generating a significant influx of good used book inventory directly to you from your surrounding community. The idea is intended as a kind of online shopkeeper’s substitute for the walk-in used book traders who have always been a big part of the bread and butter for brick-and-mortar used bookstores, but it has the added benefit of allowing you to participate in and encourage community-building and to create good will among men, women, and children. The first step is simple and straightforward: Use your computer to print up a dozen or so index cards like the one below and place them on as many community bulletin boards as you can find in your town, including schools, libraries, churches, community centers, laundromats, etc. Even better, if your community is graced with a college or university, or a hospital, search out the best bulletin boards available, especially in their libraries or in the buildings such as departmental offices where there may be faculty bulletin boards:
TURN YOUR USED BOOKS INTO CASH
FOR YOUR SCHOOL, CLUB, LIBRARY,
OR COMMUNITY GROUP!
Windwalker Books, a Belmont-based business, will accept your used books and make a 10% cash contribution based on their resale value to the school, club, or community organization of your choice. Books must be in very good condition without mildew or significant damage or wear.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
OR TO SCHEDULE A DONATION,
CALL 617-555-1287 TODAY!
At the same time you are doing this, it is very important to make some policy decisions and to then apply them consistently:
· Will you pick up books on location, or require that they be delivered to you?
· Will you be taking the tax deductions involved, or allowing the person providing the books to make the deductions?
· How will you respond if private citizens call to say they would like to give you a box of books and have you make the donation to them?
· Are there any exceptions to the range of organizations to which you will make donations? Will you require that such organizations be restricted to those who can provide you with an IRS letter showing that donations to them are tax deductible? (It is worth noting here that such status may not be necessary for you to take a tax deduction if the payment you are making is a purchase payment for inventory).
· Will you be using a phone number that actually rings in your home? This is important because most online booksellers working from home have grown pleasantly accustomed to a home life with relatively few intrusions from the business world, and the change can be jarring!
· How and when will you make the donations? One suggestion would be to tell the person who brings the books that you will list the books online within one week and that you will send a check on to that person, by specified date, to be delivered to the charitable organization in question. The check of course would be made payable to the organization. (On the other hand, as you will see below, you may want to establish a rule whereby you make the first contribution to any organization directly to that organization, so that you can establish ongoing institutional contact.)
· Will you pre-qualify the books on the telephone before either you or the initial contributor does any schlepping? Naturally such pre-qualification is far from fail-safe, but if you ask a few questions on the front end about selection and condition it will be easier for the donor to understand later why you don’t want to take his books.
As you can see, the issues are potentially complex, but you will simplify them greatly if you resolve the policy issues on the front end and apply them consistently. If you try this inventory-building strategy and the first two or three contributors don’t really contribute anything of value, don’t be too quick to give up on the strategy. Over the long haul you will often find that a significant percentage of the folks who contact you will have books that you will be very happy to get.
As we hinted above, there is also another possible tier of activity here, wherein some of the organizations involved could decide to use your idea (you bought this book, so you can call it “your” idea) as an ongoing institutional fundraiser. That’s why I suggested above that, the first time you have a donation for the Cesar Chavez Middle School, you may want to make a phone call to the principal and make an appointment to bring it over yourself so that you can establish initial contact and introduce the possibility of an ongoing fundraiser where the school (or club or civic group) actually encourages its members to get their old books to you or even holds a book drive! It could happen. But if it does, be prepared to lay out some cash, just as you would expect to do at a good library sale or an estate sale.
Along similar lines, you may also find it worthwhile to send out an email version of the index card message if you can get your hands on useful email lists or directories such as the local university’s faculty email list. If you use email, make sure you lead with the philanthropic nature of your mission so as to reduce as much as possible the number of recipients who will be turned off because they think of your message as “spam.”
We’d love to see used booksellers in every town or neighborhood in the United States carry out this strategy. Yes, we do have ulterior motives. In addition to the fact that this strategy should allow you to pre-empt the ultimate movement of many good used books to your competitors who would otherwise have an equal chance to get them at library sales, yard sales, etc., it should also reduce somewhat the number of people in your town who are likely to sell a few books here and there online without ever becoming entrepreneurial about it. While we have nothing against people selling a few books here and there on Amazon or Ebay or Half.com, because ultimately it does increase overall book-buying tendencies, we also think that it’s a good thing for each of these online marketplaces if the vast majority of the transactions on these venues involve sellers who understand professionalism, customer service, and the terminology and standards of the used bookselling profession, and take them very, very seriously.
What should you pay for your inventory? In 1986 a colleague by the name of Dale L. Gilbert wrote a terrific guide to running a brick and mortar used bookshop (Complete Guide to Starting a Used Bookstore, Chicago Review Press, 0-914091-89-1), which has gone out of print and become fairly scarce and expensive. In it he provided some good rules of thumb for buying (and trading for) general stock brought into a brick and mortar store, and these formulas were based on the idea that a store would sell used books for half their cover price (adjusted for inflation, of course), buy them from customers for one-fourth what the store intends to sell them for, and or take them in trade for double that amount. So, if a customer brings in a nice paperback copy of The Firm for $7.95, then you would expect to receive $3.95 for it, and you would offer your customer $1 in cash or $2 in trade.
Sadly, things have changed. At this writing, there are 674 copies of The Firm for sale on Amazon’s Marketplace, and 48 of them are priced at one penny each. If you buy many such books at a dollar each you’ll be out of business very soon, unless you have a brick and mortar shop which may or may not provide a way of selling titles that have become cheaper than paper online. The general stock sellers who are operating profitably online are acquiring the vast majority of their books at a far lower cost, often averaging less than a quarter a book overall, and they are avoiding glutted or deadwood titles like the plague. My own rules of thumb for maximum general stock prices is one dollar for hardcovers, fifty cents for trade paperbacks, and twenty-five cents for mass market paperbacks. I’ll make an exception maybe once for every two hundred general stock titles I pick up, or if I see a book I want to read first, or if I am using trade credit at a brick and mortar used bookstore. But keep in mind that those rule of thumb prices are maximums, and when I attend a good Friends of Library sale I am usually looking to acquire good stock for an average price of 15 to 20 cents per book.
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