Suzie Eisfelder

Do you want a Secondhand Booksellers Bootcamp in Australia?

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In a previous post I mentioned a Booksellers’ Boot Camp I’d read about where sellers of antiquarian and secondhand books learnt so much about the antiquarian and secondhand book trade.  Some of the topics they learn about are:

How to Handle Books
Mail order/online bookselling, including ethics and traditions
Acquiring stock
Wrapping and Shipping
Technology for Booksellers
Database Creation and Management
Cataloging
Pricing

from bookthink.com

I read this article with great interest and a lot of envy, I couldn’t help thinking how different the industry in Australia would be if we had a conference of this nature so I did some research online and I found the Australian Booksellers Association have some training and it looks really useful information.  They teach things such as Loss Prevention, Helping Your Team to Help You, How to Set Standards For Your Team and Making Money From Kids (no, not stealing from children but learning about children’s literature), as well as having a whole host of networking opportunities, a Trade Exhibition and so much more.  I did some more research and found nothing for antiquarian and secondhand booksellers and certainly nothing for online booksellers.  All of the information I know about pre-loved books I’ve learnt on-the-job.
When I find a new website the first thing I do after I’ve signed up and had a good look around is to check out the forum and see what people are saying, a busy forum can be a good sign of a good website, or it can be a bad sign if everything is negative.  I generally head straight to any part of the forum that has a vague mention of books, I’m sure there’s a reason but it escapes me just now.  Anyway, this particular website was eBay, a website that needs no advertising from me so I hope our editor won’t link to them.  This is where I got my start with selling books.  I’d sold my old electronic diary through there and got a much higher price than I’d expected so I was wasting a bit of time trawling listings when I found some magazines for sale and I just happened to have them on my shelf.  I looked at them and thought about the money and the magazines and the money and the magazines, eventually the money won and I listed them.  I spent my time selling magazines and reading the forums, eventually finding something I wanted to say.
The books board (as we call it, although it’s supposed to be for books, music and sport, is almost entirely composed of book people) was full of very knowledgable and friendly people who were perfectly happy to share their knowledge and advise about prices and listing tips.  They accepted me as one of their own despite my lack of knowledge and experience and they taught me so much, they also accepted me when the Melbourne people decided to meet up for the lunch for the first time.  It was a lovely afternoon and we spent the entire time talking about eBay and books, we still meet occasionally and most of the conversation is about books and selling online as most of us now have our own websites.

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The Process of Pricing a Book to Sell Online

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Buying books to sell online is a very exciting process. I seriously enjoy the buying of books and can wax lyrical for days about the joys of going op shopping or putting together a box or more of books at a book fair, but this is only a part of the process.

Once I have my books it is time for some serious work. The first step is to clean them up by removing pencil marks and stickers, I don’t remove library stickers unless they’re already starting to come off. Then comes the need to remove any sticky left from the stickers and there’s a whole armoury involved in the processes of removing pencil marks and sticky from stickers which I won’t deal with now. This blog will deal with the precise mathematical formula for pricing pre-loved books for selling online.

I’ll do a random book from my pile so you can then look at the listing on my website afterwards. In this case, the book is Catweazle by Richard Carpenter. A lovely little book, it’s the novelisation of the series screened in the UK on ITV in the 1970s and also in Australia. I recall it well from my childhood and so when I saw the book I just had to pick it up to sell, the fact that they had a price of 30c on it and there is very little wear may have had something to do with it. A book like this I will normally google so I can look up the background to get some idea of the popularity of the book, see how many were written, when they were first published and any other related or unrelated information that I can find. So, my google search finds a fan website which indicates a possible fan base looking for Catweazle paraphenalia and also a Wikipedia page. It’s also useful if you’re able to read every scrap of newspaper you can in case there are related articles hanging around. My DD just saw the book and told me about an article she read recently in the Herald Sun Supplement. It’s about fashion and she tells me the way Catweazle was dressed is currently the height of fashion, it probably cost about 11 pounds to dress him in the 1970s and would now cost about 200 pounds. All these things can help or hinder.

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Getting Boots Into Your Bookshop

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Online shops and physical bookshops share some challenges and one is called traffic, getting people to actually come in the door.  Physical shops do this by being in a good location and by advertising, online shops do this with SEO.  There are many different forms of SEO, there’s all the traditional forms of SEO which … Read more

When does bulk buying for your bookshop get out of hand?

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The listing was for 2,000+ books and I won it for some ridiculously small amount, totally stunned at that as I kept on reducing my top price before I actually put in my bid. When I got there, with my nephew for muscle, there were more like 4,500 books. I know it’s not a lot compared to some other people’s buys but it was a lot for me at the time, bear in mind I was really only starting out and I used to buy a handful of books at a time at op shops and garage sales. I was floored and unable to deal with them for some time.

Selling online can be a solitary occupation but you can still make friends

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Selling online

One of the challenges of selling online is the lack of people contact.  It’s something I really notice.  One of the things I do to combat this is to volunteer at an Op Shop (Charity Shop) for half a day a week.  I was very careful when I chose the op shop, I looked at the volunteers who all seemed very nice and were quite happily talking to who-ever walked in.  I liked this so I promptly volunteered.  I was feeling particularly bold that day as I had recently shaved my head for the Leukaemia Foundations Shave-For-A-Cure and so it was easy to bite the bullet and speak up.  I was quite open about selling books online and they were rather blase about it.  They did ask for more details but they also exclaimed over my lack of hair in the same way.  I was quite explicit about needing to pay the same for books as regular customers and some of the other volunteers actually stick to that and don’t make me pay the volunteer rates.  I’ve met some lovely people at the op shop.  One lady I’ve worked with asked me to get her two copies of a particular book, Something That Happens to Other People, a book I’ve recently reviewed on my own blog.  She tells me she is in the book and I’ll talk to her about it in the New Year.   Then there’s the lady who does scrapbooking and has returned a number of times, I have some little craft items from my house that are waiting for her in the new year that she might be able to use.

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