Selling Books Online

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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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Bookstore Speak: Words of the Trade

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Bookstore Speak:

Words of the Trade

By Louis Gereaux

All booksellers of used books will have at one time or another come across the word dog-eared.  What does that word mean anyway, and where did it come from?  Dog eared pages are less common in today’s fast turn around of used books. Many used book are almost new.  It might be that more readers are using the bookmarks we stick in our books for sale, who knows?  But the term dog eared means a turned down corner of a book page.  The term originated in the trade because these turned down pages look like the ears of dogs which do not stick up.

This antiquated term – dog-eared is no longer used that much in online book descriptions as a result of mass listings, but it should be there.  If for no other reason, there have to be books on the market which have turned down page corners. As opposed to the term binding tight – this is a term that has survived and thrived in online bookselling.  Why switch the order of the words when one means to say the book has a tight binding? That is the original book selling term though, and binding tight is a phrase used to make a strong positive impression on the potential buyer.  It says this is a book which will not fall apart when you receive it – the worst fear of most used book purchasers site unseen.

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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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Being Competitive From Afar…

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As you may have seen in my previous post, I live in Perth Western Australia. A very far away place to be.

The internet has provided a more even playing field in the world of internet retail. I can now sell to someone in Springer New Mexico, or Toulouse France or Cheltenham in the United Kingdom and it’s almost like having my own store in those very countries.

The biggest problem I face now, as a seller in Australia (and I am not alone here) is the postage costs. It can cost almost the price of a very small car just to post a book to the other side of Australia, let alone the other side of the world.

For example, to send a book in Australia that weighs over 500grams (approximately 17 ounces) costs AUS$9.90. To send a book under 500grams has varying prices ranging from AUS$1.10 through to AUS$5.70. You can just about double these prices for international postage AND you can also wait up to 3 months for that book to be delivered, depending on which postage option you’ve chosen.

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