So you’ve read about it, heard about it and gotten excited. You want to sell used books, more specifically because the margins are so great and the overhead so low, you want to sell used books online. You are determined to get into the business, but you want to do it right. Your commonsense tells you that from a sales and profitability standpoint, all books are not created equal. Some are in great demand and some books you can’t even give away. Some titles sell year in year out reliably, but not in great quantities, and yet, almost like annuities, make a dependable, if not outrageous, small return on investment. Some are like comets, selling huge quantities for a very short time, or during different seasons of the year, and suddenly die thereafter mysteriously. Obviously you want to acquire only winners for your online bookstore.
So how do you select the best inventory to be success when you want to sell used books online? What in fact are the qualities and characteristics of the best books to sell online? Very simply the best books to sell online are those that turnover quickly, are highly profitable and give you a great return on your investment. Sounds easy, doesn’t? Well, it is and it isn’t. It can be a breeze if you have studied your target market and understand its dynamics, including the favored book content-genre (s), bindings, price points and acceptable condition of books for the customers in your chosen market.
But learning about the used book market in order to achieve profitability skills is an on-the-job education. The information you need to know to be really successful is gained by jumping in and taking some risks. You have to open your online bookstore, participate in the action, in order to achieve the necessary expertise. And the fact is most online used book entrepreneurs start out by using the “spaghetti approach” for this very good reason. They throw up a bunch of used books on a site and see which “stick,” meaning, a bit paradoxically here, which sell. They may have a number of their own books they want to sell and have harum scarum acquired rather indiscriminately other books through yard sales, Friends of the Library sales, friends and family. They assemble a rag tag inventory, list it online at one of the online bookselling sites like Amazon, and wait and see what happens. What happens, of course, is that some books sell and some books don’t. Some books literally fly off the shelves and some just sit there and gather dust. The challenge for the online bookseller is to analyze and examine his or her sales records, do some serious online research, check out the inventories and methods of other online used booksellers and figure out the why’s and wherefor’s of the hot sellers and the duds. This is a fairly complex process because there are many variables which contribute (or inhibit) the sale of any book online (or anywhere, for that matter).
A grasp and understanding of the standard nomenclature for book sales used in the professional book industry (major publishers, wholesalers and retailers), can be immensely helpful to the novice online bookseller because it will help him or her organize the sales data for better analysis. Key terms include category (i.e., “nature,” “science,” “biography,” “fiction” etc.), subject (not the same as category; subject is what a book is “about”), genre (literary form such as” mystery,” “novel,” “short stories”), date of publication, binding (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, etc.), new release, backlist, classics and more. All of this information is readily available online. Finally, the matter of price and how it relates to speed of turnover and your profit margins needs to be carefully examined. You may sell thousands of books at 99 cents, but are you making any money when you factor in shipping supplies and the expenditure of your time in acquiring, listing, warehousing and shipping these books? Ultimately, any business is about the bottom line and raw numbers about unit sales and gross receipts are insufficient information for determining whether or not you are actually making real money for all of your efforts.
Only you can determine which are the best books for you to sell online, depending on your access to a steady supply of good inventory and the shrewdness with which you market it.
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