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.

I am always looking for ways to grow my business without changing my business model (working from home).  My book business is steady and my inventory is at a manageable level.  So, a while back, I decided to see what other was I could grow and tried out dropshipping. 

Dropshipping is basically where you sell other peoples inventory.  Here is how it works – a dropship supplier may have 100 copies of a book which they have listed for sale at $10.  The book would typically sell for $14 on eBay.  You list it and sell it on eBay for $14 plus shipping. You then give the dropshipper $10 plus shipping (and the shipping info) and they ship it to the buyer. 

I have used dropshippers to sell new computer and console games (not books) at my eBay store – thus using my existing store to sell more products.  I sold a bunch but did not think it was worth the profit.  The above example where you make a potential profit of $4 does not factor in fees and making sure the shipping collected is correct.  There is also the extra step of contacting the dropshipper and then hoping they ship it out on time. 

Relying on the dropshipper for the shipping was the biggest drawback for me as it took the customer service out of my control.  I had one person who received a game that was not correct (it was the right game but not the right version).  Nothing negative came of it but I do not like having my feedback score exposed to the service of another business.

It is not hard to tell that I am not a strong proponent to using dropshippers as a secondary business.  I know there are people out there who do very well using them and if you do your product research you can find some great deals.  If you do consider using dropshippers I would consider going through a company like Worldwide Brands or SaleHoo.  Both of these companies do the heavy lifting of finding legitimate wholesalers and dropshippers saving you a lot of time and headache as there appear to be a lot of iffy wholesalers out there.  Whatever you do – do not buy a wholesale list or something like it on eBay.

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.

Selling books online can be very profitable. When individual sales are quickly glanced at the potential for profits can seem great.  I have bought many books for $1 and sold it for $30 or more many times – very fat profit margins.  The thing of it is that becasue I do everything online I can lose track of my margins.  Managing your bookselling venture like a small business is important. 

I sell my books online and do almost all of the back office business online.  This creates a very simple business to run but because so much of the processes are done online.  My books and envelopes are the only real things I store.  I manage my overall business on a cash basis but keeping track of the details is important.  Here are things that are easy to lose track of in terms of really figuring out what your margins are:

• Marketplace monthly fees – Amazon is straightforward but eBay is variable
• Commissions taken per book by the marketplaces
• Postage – Amazon takes another chunk here
• Cost per envelope
• Monthly fees of Endicia
• Monthly fees of Inventory Management System – in my case The Art of Books
• Cost of books

The list can go on and it becomes depressing how much others make when I sell one book – everyone gets their cut.  So when I sell a book for $10 that I bought for $1 I am not making $9 (or even $8).  This is one reason it is some important to figure out your margins as you can figure out what books are not worth selling.

Keep track of everything, work the numbers and focus on the bottom line and you should see your profits increase.  Regulary shop around for new vendors.  Is your inventory management provider the best for the money.  How about your envelope provider? Ink toner?  All of these eat into profits.  Spend time shopping and save.

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.