Though this time of year is great for building your inventory it sure is lousy for selling it.  The average number of books I am selling is on the decline as it always is after Memorial Day.  Thankfully some big ticket items are selling (just sold a $1,000 partial set of the Encyclopedia Judaica).  The New York Times reported in today’s business section that book sales are down across the industry.  Publishers and retailers all report fewer sales.  Now this time of year is always slow for your typical online bookseller since we generally do not sell the hot beach reads.  Couple that with an industry is off then what is one to do.

• Hopefully all you booksellers plan ahead for slower summer sales and take some of the higher earning from December-February and allocate it for these months so you can keep up with buying inventory.  Both Microsoft and Quicken offer free accounting software that you can use to help with planning ahead and managing your financials. Quicken’s software is the standard that most people use but both are fine.
• Cull your inventory – going through it and de-listing the stuff that has dropped too low in price.
• Re-price more often and more aggressively if cash flow is an issue. 
• Re-visit your expenses – check all your subscriptions and services – shop around some of their competitors may offer the same services for less.  Look around for deals on shipping supplies etc.
• Branch out – if you are doing this from home – there are a myriad of ways to make money online – start doing some research but do not dive in head first in something new.  I wrote an guide about selling books online to help add some monthly revenue (you can sign up for a coupon for it in the upper right of this blog).  In a future post (coming soon) I will talk about some other ideas for branching out.

Friends of Library Sales are starting to peak now (with the exception of this weekend).  If going to book sales and elbowing people is your thing now is the time to map out your calendar – check out www.booksalefinder.com – to find your local sales. 

I don’t go to book sales much anymore but you can slowly build up your inventory by going to them.  The downside to Friend of Library sales is that they are overrun with other booksellers with their scanner many of whom work in teams.  I would often see people running into the sale and indiscriminately  scooping up armfuls of books  and putting them into bags then running to a blanket where there partner is and doing it again.  There would be no selection process – just a mad rush which would mean if you were not on of the first on line you find many books gone (and piled up on someones blanket).

I remember one sale where someone had hundreds of books piled up on a blanket after they had run like crazy through the sale – at the end of it they had hundreds of discards left laying on the grass in a pile after they had scanned them all.  Me – I would be happy to leave with 30 good books.

I hate having to get to the sales 90 minutes early to get a decent place online.  When you get in there is barely any space to move let alone put your books down.  God forbid if the place where the sale was used air conditioning too.  Also – many sales will cherry pick some titles out and put them online themselves.

This has turned into a big gripe on library sales but let me back up and restate that you can find books at them and often find some treasures at them that make it all worthwhile.  I found some rare physics texts that sold for hundreds of dollars at one sale.  These books were sitting there well after the intial mad rush but had been bypassed because they were old  (from the early sixties and pre-isbn)

Anyway – if Friend of Library sales are your thing then Good Luck and Good Hunting.

How Do Penny Book Sellers Make Money?  I am not sure if they do – if they do make a profit it is minimal a few cents at most.  Lets break down a penny sale on Amazon and see how it works.  Lets assume the seller is a Pro Merchant on Amazon and pays the $40 monthly fee.

Let’s assume the book weighs less than 1lb for shipping purposes

$4.00 – is the amount collected by Amazon – this is the $.01 plus the $3.99 standard shipping charge.

($1.35) – is the amount Amazon takes out of the shipping leaving $2.65.

($2.38) – the amount to ship a book that weighs 1lb or less via media mail as of today.

Potential profit $.27.  Twenty-Seven Cents - not factoring in other expenses such as labels, envelopes, internet, time spent listing and shipping and all the other subscription fees that make up your overhead.  So lets say a penny seller can make $.20 on each sale.  You would need to sell 500 books a day to make $100 a day at that rate – which means you are going to have to have someone help you prep all those books for shipping further eating into your profits. 

 Does this make sense as a business model – not to me.  Understand though – this is their business model – penny sellers are not by accident.  So they must be ok with those lousy margins.  Maybe the penny sellers do not value their time properly and are ok with stuffing 500 envelopes with books for $.20 each.

Sellers of books for a penny are the worst – they clutter Amazon with the junk listings with no descriptions but they do make money and so does Amazon.  Remember – Amazon makes $1.35 for every penny book sold.

Many online booksellers wonder about the mysteries of the Amazon Sales Rank.  These booksellers ponder the deep philosophical questions of what is the Amazon sales rank – how is it calculated, when is it calculated and what does it all mean and when will my book sell.

The bottom line on the Amazon Sales Rank is this – the lower the number the faster the book should sell.  What this means that if you have a book with a 40,000 sales rank and another with a 600,000 sales rank the one with a 40,000 rank is in higher demand.  Does this mean the lower rank will sell first? Not neccesarily – you need to factor in supply, your price point  and the books condition.  The lower ranked book likely has many more of them for sale on the Amazon marketplace so your copy needs to be priced to move as other copies are going to be listed after yours  and they will likely beat your price. 

 I recently got a copy of Tom Dorsey’s book Nuclear Jellyfish (I still have it unfortunately).  I listed it on Amazon to match lowest price for its condition and expected it to sell in a day or two given that the book had just been released.  Weeks have gone by and the book is still on my shelf because the price dropped on it almost immediately and I am terrible at repricing my books with any regularity.  There are, of course, dozens of copies of the book for sale and it is likely heading to penny seller territory soon enough.  Its sales rank at the time I listed it was below 10,000.  Usually the book sells quickly but sales rank alone is not a guarantee.

I have had books with high sales ranks (in the millions) go immediately.  This is often books that are out of print and there are no other copies for sale or the copies that are listed are prohibitively expensive.

Amazon Sales Rank is predominately a buying tool for me.  Sales Rank and price are the two main factors in considering what books I buy.  If it has a high resale value I will generally buy a book regardless of sales rank.  The lower the resale price the lower the sales rank needs to be.  Generally any book that sells for less then $5 I will not bother with regardless of rank.  Between $5 and $10 the sales rank needs to be very low and above $10 I am willing to have books be between 400k and 800k in rank.  Above that the book needs to be at least $12.  All of this is fluid and depends on how much inventory I have and how sales are.

So does it matter how Amazon calculates sales ranks? No.

The holiday season through the end of January is the busiest time of year for most booksellers.  I would say late August/early September is the second busiest (beginning of school year).  Last year my book sales spiked in December and were even higher in January.  Like many retailers, whether online or brick & mortar, we depend on this time of year.

The holidays are the biggest factor for the sales spike in December but what about the increase in book sales in January?  I think there are several factors to help explain January sales:

1.  Another school semester generally starts in January so all the students are buying their books online

2.  Customer Returns – many people are returning items to Amazon and using the credit to buy books

3.  Gift Cards/Cash Gifts – People receive these for Christmas and redeem them in January.

Hopefully the economy does not lessen the impact of items #2 & #3.

I would suggest that you still have time to increase your inventory to take advantage of this online buying season.  I have approximately 600 books coming from one of my sources next week to be ready for the season.  Library sales this time of year are few and far between so if they are your primary inventory source you will need to look elsewhere.  You will also need all the shipping supplies to meet the new demand.  Last year I was filling anywhere from 35 to 55 orders a day during these two months.

If you need help with finding alternative book sources for the holiday season I recommend several in my bookselling guide which can be purchased here www.booksellingguide.com.

No matter what  – prepare now for the online bookselling high season so you can actually enjoy them rather than running around looking for inventory.