BookFinder gets facelift, adds shipping fee info

BookFinder unveiled a sleek new design and added support for shipping prices.

Search results now show prices including the cost of standard shipping depending on the destination. The feature can be disabled by clicking on the link "Show prices without shipping" at the top of search results.

Web site lets you track Amazon sales ranks

I've been using a cool Web site that lets you draw graphs of Amazon sales rankings of your favorite books or other products. RankForest lets you add items to a personal collection for easy reference.

Most of RankForest's features are free, but a few require a paid membership. Here's a page where you can anonymously browse some of the things members are tracking.

Sales rankings for most items are updated hourly. Here's more information about Amazon Sales Ranks.

eBay catalog gives short shrift to books

eBay sent a 28-page glossy paper catalog to buyers in June that focuses mainly on fashion accessories and gadgets. An online version is here.

The sole mention of books was in the bottom corner of page 24, where it shows stock photos of novels by Stephen King and James Patterson.

Oddly, the catalog focuses almost exclusively on new merchandise, but makes no mention of eBay's new Express platform. This probably won't do much to shake off the summer doldrums.

Google Checkout: Will it kill Amazon's 1-Click?

After nearly two years of anticipation, buzz and hype, Google's new payment service is finally on the market.

What does this mean for booksellers? Probably not much today. But 10 years from now, we'll probably all be doing business differently -- and we might look back on the advent of Google Checkout as a major turning point.

Until now, most of the pundits have been arguing whether Google Checkout will kill PayPal. It probably won't. The real question is, will Google Checkout undermine the big advantages Amazon has today?

Amazon has a virtual monopoly on online book sales, for three main reasons:

1) It's easy to find books on Amazon.
2) Nobody can beat Amazon's selection, thanks to its third-party sellers.
2) Checkout is easy and reliable at Amazon -- it only takes one click.

What if there were 10,000 online bookstores, all of them offering one-click checkout using Google? Could Google's search results make a better store than Amazon? Some people think so.

What do you think?

Amazon cracks down on collectible listings

Amazon will start requiring that books, music, and video items listed under the "Collectible" category be priced at a minimum of $10 and be unique in some way.

Starting the week of July 10, collectible listings must be "unique" in some way that "increases value for a collector," such as a signature, inscription, or some other scarce quality, according to an anonymous announcement posted by Amazon this afternoon. Feedback about the change can be sent to: collectible-books-feedback@amazon.com

Book addicts getting hooked on LibraryThing, tags

"Tagging" is the Internet buzzword of the day. It's the organizing principle behind Flickr, the wildly popular site where people upload and share photos. Instead of sticking pictures in folders labeled "2006 vacation," for instance, Flickr users assign "tags" to the photos -- informal keywords such as "beach" or "sand dunes" -- making them easy to find.

Tags are getting popular with book lovers too, and some libraries allow users to add tags to their card catalog. Leading the charge in book-tagging is LibraryThing, which has signed up nearly 50,000 users since it was launched last August. Members enter books they own, and assign tags as a way to organize them and compare their collections with other LibraryThing users.

Entering your personal library at LibraryThing is pretty easy, and addictive. And once you've done it, you'll see lots of interesting connections between your books and other members' collections.

Why is this important to booksellers? At the rate it's going, tags may become a popular way for readers to discover new books they want to buy -- especially the obscure, scarce books so profitable for online sellers.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've probably noticed the blue "tag cloud" on the right, which shows popular keyword searches here. If you want to see a huge one, check out the most popular tags assigned by LibraryThing users. In theory, this is -- or could become -- the most detailed and current, yet easy-to-use book index on the planet.

For the past six months, Amazon also has been allowing users to tag books, but the feature hasn't gotten much traction yet -- perhaps because it's so hard to notice the small "Tag this product" section on Amazon's doodad-filled product pages.

Meanwhile Amazon has been quietly working on something similar to LibraryThing, which it calls Media Library. This replaces what Amazon used to call its "Digital Locker," which served as a safe deposit box for e-books or downloadable movies you'd purchased previously from Amazon.

Now, all of the purchases you've made on Amazon -- including paper-bound books -- can be seen in Your Media Library. One weakness of Amazon's service is that only items you've purchased from Amazon can be added.

LibraryThing has been growing like wildfire, with virtually no marketing except word-of-mouth. Just recently the company's founder hired his first full-time employee (a librarian named Abby) after AbeBooks.com bought 40 percent of the site.

Basic accounts at LibraryThing are free, and limit you to 200 books in your library. You can upgrade to unlimited usage for $10 a year, or a one-time payment of $25.

Q&A: How can I find out the quantity of books another seller has?

QUESTION: I've listed a book for sale on Amazon but am unsure where to price it. Another seller has it listed far below the price of most other sellers. I'd like a quick sale but don't want to price low if this other seller is going to run out quickly. How can I tell if this seller has a huge quantity of the book?

ANSWER: The fastest way to see the quantity in another seller's listing is to add the item to your Amazon shopping cart temporarily. Here's how:

Go to the seller listings here for the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. This is a good example, because it's a current blockbuster (its sales rank is about 275) but since it's oversupplied on Amazon, it's priced too low now.

As I'm looking at the listings now (on the afternoon of June 23), the seller smokymtnbooks has the low price at $4.98. Click the orange button on the right of this listing, "Add to Cart." (Be sure to turn off one-click checkout if you have it turned on.)

On the next page, click on the shopping cart icon at the top of the page. You'll see the book "Collapse" in your cart, and a Quantity box on the right. Delete the number 1 in the quantity box and enter 999, then press return. When I did that just now, the number 999 changed to 140 when the page reloaded. That means this seller's listing had a quantity of 140 at that moment.

What does all this mean? Well, if you want to sell a copy of "Collapse" on Amazon this weekend, you'll probably need to price it at around $5. But my hunch is you could sell it for $8 or $9 if you wait until the end of the summer. I'm betting this book will be assigned reading for many college sociology students this fall. When students start buying it in August, its sales rank might go down to about 50, and these low-priced copies will be snapped up in a hurry.

There's no guarantee the price will go back up, that's just my guess. The reason it's going for $4.98 now is it's a "remainder" book -- the publisher printed too many copies, and bookstores are starting to send some back. Depending on how heavily overstocked stores are with this book, "Collapse" could literally collapse this summer, and become Amazon's next penny book.

Q&A: How much should I pay for my friend's books?

QUESTION: A friend of mine has over 200 barely used nonfiction books he is willing to sell to me. He wants me to either buy them all outright, or give him a percentage of the sales. I don't know where to begin on giving him a quote for all the books.

ANSWER: My instinct would be to buy the whole lot -- but only if I could get them for a couple dollars apiece.

I usually pay no more than $2 or $3 for a book, and that's when I can hand-pick them at a sale and know that on average I'll have a nice profit.

Unfortunately, I have a hunch your friend is expecting more cash.

If you haven't gotten a good look at the lot and don't have any idea what it's worth, my suggestion would be to sell the collection on consignment. Give your friend the proceeds in return for, say, a 20-percent commission. That way you could eliminate the risk of losing money -- and you'll probably learn a bit about book picking.

I hope your friendship survives this venture too.

Q&A: Why are prices so different on various bookselling sites?

QUESTION: I'm confused by the apparent disconnect between the prices for books on eBay and prices quoted on Abebooks for the same title. And sometimes the titles are totally absent from eBay. Are there simply not that many "collectible" book buyers on eBay? Do people really go to ABE and buy what they could find on eBay for just a few dollars?

ANSWER: I agree that there is a real disconnect between the book sites and eBay. I suspect it's a different situation with every book and buyer. I think buyers (and sellers) get used to one site, they tend to stick with it. They get comfortable with it and end up doing most of their buying and selling there.

I don't sell that much on eBay currently, but when I do I'm always amazed at the price disparities with Amazon. And there's only a couple explanations -- the eBay buyer either doesn't check prices on Amazon, or would just rather buy on eBay.

And we should make a distinction between "collectibles" and books that are simply scarce.

I think there is lots of collectibles book action on eBay that doesn't go on at Amazon, for the simple reason that sellers can post a bunch of pictures of the actual book on eBay. I don't think anybody would pay more than $1,000 for a collectible book on Amazon (the way it's set up now) when it's not obvious to them how to contact the seller or view a photo of the actual book.

But I have heard through the grapevine that Amazon is going to set up a section of their site devoted to collectible books. If they did that and publicized it well, it might not only take some of the collectibles book business away from eBay, but could actually expand the market for collectibles -- just as Amazon has expanded the market for plain old used books by exposing more people to the option.

I think it's safe to assume that 95 percent of the book-buying public is unaware of ABE. On the other hand, most collectors probably have.

It's a lot easier to "discover" books on Amazon compared to most other sites because the site is personalized for each user and Amazon's computer makes book recommendations on your past purchases.

Lots of people who have never thought about going to a used bookstore in their life now buy lots of used books on Amazon. So my hunch is they could do the same with collectible books, if they do it right.

On the other hand, I think booksellers are having trouble getting good prices for books on eBay these days unless they are truly unique books. So that may account for the dearth of titles you see there.

Amazon wants you to tweak its search engine

Here's a new feature from Amazon that lets any registered user instantly add human intelligence to its search results.

On each book product page, there's a new section with the heading "Help others find this item." You can click the link to make a "search suggestion."

Since I'm a book author, I immediately thought of a suggestion I could make for my title, "The Home-Based Bookstore." My suggestion was for Amazon to show my book when shoppers searched for "bookselling." Since that keyword isn't in my title, the book was buried in search results, even though it's the bestselling book on Amazon about bookselling.

When this feature debuted two days ago, I clicked the link, and it brought me to this screen:

Surprisingly, my suggestion was adopted within 48 hours, and "Home-Based Bookstore" began appearing near the top for searches using the keyword "bookselling." In the search results, you can even see the reason I gave for my suggestion: "This title is about bookselling but the word isn't in the title or subtitle. Could be useful for searchers."

It will be interesting to see how this feature works out for Amazon. Human intelligence could be a terrific help for its search engine, which can be wacky at times. But it seems a feature like this could be misused by spammers and practical jokers, and I don't see any mechanism for policing it.

However, Amazon's guidelines for prohibited content do seem to cover all the bases:
* Profanity, obscenities, or spiteful remarks
* Commenting on other search suggestions. Other suggestions and their position in search results are subject to change without notice
* Phone numbers, mail addresses, URLs
* Availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping information
* Time-sensitive material (i.e. concerts, interviews etc)
* Suggestions which may be controversial, politically or otherwise

Have amateurs and the Internet ruined used bookselling?

Booksellers can be a pessimistic lot. Change can be upsetting, and bookselling is seeing more change more quickly than any time since the invention of movable type.

Is all lost? Maybe, maybe not, says Canadian bookseller Patrick Hempelmann:

The traditional concept of the used bookstore is basically dead: to wait for people to look for books that are out of print and hard to find, and therefore be able to charge a high price because of the rarity of what you are selling, that idea has been destroyed by ABE and by the Internet. There are very few books that are hard to find now.

What still works is to sell good books, remainders, review copies, used and hurt books and sell them cheaper, much much cheaper, than you'd pay at Indigo or Chapters. In the U.S., the used book business is growing faster than the new.

Alibris says Barnes & Noble program won't break ties

Barnes & Noble's plans to establish its own third-party marketplace won't kill its relationship with Alirbris, according to Albris executives:

Alibris and the Barnes & Noble BookQuest (BNBQ) program will continue to expand their relationship in ways that help sell more of your books to BN.com customers.

BN.com has decided to work directly with a very small group of sellers to test a new platform. They are doing this to expand their selection and ensure that they are not reliant on a single supplier.

BN.com continues to partner with Alibris because of the value we provide in helping sellers and BN.com manage inventory and orders efficiently and effectively. Alibris and BN.com are also working together to bring new benefits to Alibris sellers:

Remove the 5% markup. Today, your books on BN.com are priced 5% above your list price. This markup will be eliminated by the holiday season.

UK expansion. The current BNBQ program is restricted to US and Canadian sellers. Alibris and BN.com have plans to allow UK seller participation. The program will not include UK seller in-print US ISBN inventory, but broader UK-based selections would be made available to BN.com US and Canadian customers.

As always, we remain committed to helping independent sellers succeed by managing inventory and orders across all Alibris sales channels and business partnerships and providing top-notch seller support. We will keep you informed about the launch of new BNBQ programs targeted to benefit sellers.

Thank you for your continuing participation with Alibris.

Sincerely,

A.J. Kohn
Director, Direct Marketing and Sales
Alibris

Barnes & Noble rolls out welcome mat for sellers

The world's largest book retailer is opening its Web site to used booksellers.

Barnes & Noble is telephoning used bookshops and online sellers this week, asking them to sign up here and list their used books for sale alongside B&N's new book listings, similar to Amazon Marketplace.

[This post was updated with new information from Barnes & Noble at 2:45 p.m. on 6/14/2006. Please see the bold paragraph at the bottom.]

Clearly, B&N wants to capture some of the used-book market from Amazon, which has built its Marketplace venue into a huge cash cow by signing up used bookstores and part-time sellers. Today nearly one in four Amazon shipments are from a Marketplace seller. Industrywide, sales of used books are growing at 11 percent annually while new-book sales are flat.

My hunch is this Barnes & Noble program will turn into the biggest opportunity for booksellers since Amazon rolled out its Marketplace platform nearly six years ago.

Sellers won't be charged a monthly fee at B&N, unlike Amazon's $39.99 monthly fee for Pro-Merchants. B&N will take a 15-percent commission on sales and deposit payments to seller bank accounts once every two weeks.

Here's how third-party seller listings appear now. Here's the Help Desk buyers see when ordering from third-party sellers.

It appears B&N will closely police its third-party sellers, banning two common but controversial practices on Amazon: "penny selling" and "drop-shipping."

Books can't be listed for less than $1.99 on BN.com And prices can't exceed Barnes & Noble's price unless the book is signed by the author or is a first edition.

The prohibition on drop-shipping is clear. According to its list of seller policies, "sellers must be currently in possession of such listed inventory." And, just in case that wasn't clear enough, the document specifically outlaws the listing of "items that are in the possession of other suppliers."

Like Amazon, BN.com prohibits the sale of promotional items including Advanced Reading Copies. Condition guidelines will be identical to Amazon and Half.com, including New, Like New, Very Good, Good, and Acceptable.

So far B&N has not done anything to publicize the program. The company didn't respond when I asked for more information early Tuesday. However, I was able to complete an application online, which doesn't obligate you to sell or pay fees.

Barnes & Noble already had a third-party seller program, known as BookQuest, but it's been closed to new members for two years and the listings haven't been promoted or highly visible on the B&N Web site. Previously, members of Abebooks.com and Alibris.com could add their inventory to BookQuest.

Sellers will be able to upload their inventory via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) using Homebase or tab-delimited text files, which can be produced by Microsoft Excel and most inventory software.

Customers will pay $3.49 for standard shipping, and sellers will receive these shipping credits:
Standard Domestic: $2.30
Express Domestic: $5.05
Canadian: $6.35
International: $10.

Added 6/14/2006:
Barnes & Noble has asked me to emphasize that at this point, participation in this program is by invitation only. The program hasn't been announced officially since some of the online tools sellers will be using are still being beta-tested. However, sellers who would like to be considered for the program can send e-mail to sellerrelations@bookquest.com and indicate their contact information, how long they've been selling books online, and how much inventory they have, etc. If the program is opened up for broader participation, B&N will be looking for sellers with some experience selling used and out-of-print books online and a relatively sizeable volume of listings.

Library employee caught selling rare books on eBay

An employee of England's Manchester Central Library is under police investigation after auctioning several pilfered books on eBay's UK site.

Police recovered hundreds of books from the employee's home, some of them 300 years old and worth nearly $40,000 apiece.

Q&A: What can I do with my MediaScouter hardware?

QUESTION: After reading about MediaScouter last week on this blog, I purchased their recommended hardware, a Socket scanner and PDA. Then I found out they've suspended new subscriptions, and I'm stuck with some expensive gadgets I can do nothing with.

ANSWER: It seems that MediaScouter got a few more customers than they were expecting. Now they're scrambling to add capacity. I wrote to them about your situation, and they replied promptly: They'll add a subscription for you (and anyone else in this same boat) if you'll e-mail them and explain you've already bought the hardware.

I guess MediaScouter has done the right thing by capping subscriptions until they get their act together. Better to turn away customers for a while rather than ensure crummy service for all.

10 Online Bookselling Tips: Quick eBay Cash

By Nick Howes

1. Many category books, such as romance, Western, or science fiction, sell best on lots of 20 or more.

2. Some authors sell very well individually. Popular romance author Nora Roberts is one. However, there's a glut of books by other popular authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz which only sell in a large collection or as part of a more general horror lot. Low prices also apply to something like Star Trek books...you need a huge lot to get even a small bid.

3. Some authors or themes do not sell at any price. I once gave away 80 routine Harlequin silhouette romances for which I could not even get a $3 bid.

4. Children's books are considered very popular.

5. With lots, subcategories will generate higher prices. Romance subcategories, for example, include medieval, Civil War, Western, time travel, occult, fantasy, American Indian, etc. You can come up with some specialized category for which some buyer will salivate.

6. Do not underestimate the power of the word "lot" in your title when appropriate. It is a top eBay search term.

7. Your ultimate information source is eBay itself. See how others list their sales, use description and scans, and, above all, research what your book is going for. I'm amazed that people list books for $20 when everyone else is asking $1 or $2 for the same title.

8. Check your own bookshelves for books to sell, then ask friends and relatives if they have books to get rid of. My sister contributed five bags of paperback books she'd stockpiled. Then hit yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, and, the best, library sales. Library sales are bargains, especially on $2 a bag day where you pay literally pennies per book. You can also run a newspaper ad offering to buy paperback books.

9. Make your sales goal $1.00 per book when selling by lot. Ideally, the per unit expense will be .25 or less per book. You can justify buying a few books for .50 or even .75 if it substantially increases the value of your lot. This way the per unit expense averages out to more than .25 but less than .50.

10. Recycle packaging material wherever possible. Environmentally sound, it also cuts the handling charge you must request. Check store dumpsters, ask friends to save their packaging.

Nick Howes is a freelance writer of magazine, newspaper, and online articles and a news broadcaster at a Midwestern radio station. His website at http://home.midwest.net/~howes/ includes an online newsletter and an article archive.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nick_Howes

How to Request a Member's Contact Information on eBay

By Donny Lowy

eBay enables you to directly request the contact information of your trading partner in case you are unable to do so through email. You can request for eBay users who are engaged with your current or recent transactions. A seller in any active transaction can request contact information of bidders on eBay for current transactions as well as in closed transaction of the winning bidder. Similarly, a bidder can request contact information of a seller during an active transaction or a closed one if he is the winning bidder. Moreover, access to international users might be limited due to the International laws.

Open an eBay page. On most of the eBay pages you will see the ‘search’ button in the top right corner. For requesting the contact information of a person, click on the link ‘advanced search’ under the search button. On the left side of the page click on the link ‘find contact information’ under the members section.

Next type the ‘user id’ of the member and the item number for the current transaction or closed transaction. The requested information will be received on your registered email id. But this information can be used only in the way listed in the eBay’s Privacy Policy. The user will also get your information of whose information you have received.

If after requesting you get an invalid contact information then go through the contact information policy on eBay. Also, keep your information updated too.

Donny Lowy runs http://www.closeoutexplosion.com an online wholesale and closeout business that supplies eBay sellers, retailers, and flea market vendors.

He also manages http://www.wholesalecloseoutforum.com an online wholesale and closeout forum.

Donny can be reached at 718-389-5502.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Donny_Lowy

How to Edit Store Inventory Listings on eBay

By Donny Lowy

If you are an eBay store seller you can access additional listing format known as Store Inventory format. You can use this format to complement and extend your eBay listings beyond the ‘online auction’ or ‘fixed price’ formats. Though Store Inventory listings have a longer duration and lower Insertion Fees, they have limited visibility compared to the Online Auction and Fixed Price formats.

Anyhow, to save on time you have the option to edit multiple Store Inventory listings instantly. For instance if you intend to change the ‘Buy It Now price’ or any other feature, you simply have to follow a few steps. Click on the drop-down menu and select ‘store inventory’ of ‘items I am selling’ view of My eBay. Click on the link ‘Go’. Here only your Store Inventory listings will be shown in the list. If you are using Selling Manager Pro then you can go to the Active Listings view and click the ‘show store item’ button. Next, select the listings you want to edit by clicking the checkbox besides each listing. Now click on the ‘edit item’ at the top of the view. Edit item page will now be opened where you can edit fields for each of the listings as required and then click the ‘submit’ button. Instantly your desired changes will take place.

If you want to make changes for bulk listings, you have to choose the same conditions for each item before sending. For instance, this editing will not work if some items are ‘new’ and ‘refurbished’ whereas a few are simply “new”. If your items are in the same category, same condition option is fulfilled and your work of editing bulk listings becomes easier.

Donny Lowy runs http://www.closeoutexplosion.com an online wholesale and closeout business that supplies eBay sellers, retailers, and flea market vendors.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Donny_Lowy

Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them on eBay

By Avril Harper

Vintage books and magazines were packed with prints and advertisements and other paper items which are not only interesting, but very collectable, and profitable, too. So many things derived from these old publications are hot sellers on eBay including: prints, advertisements, knitting and other craftwork patterns, recipes, how to articles, historical articles, music scores, stories and other out of copyright material … etc., etc, etc.

Let me introduce you to just a few of these easy to find items.

Prints

Old prints are valuable collectors' pieces and there's a good income to be made simply from packaging prints neatly and categorizing them according to theme, eBay's best sellers being: animals, sports (especially golf and horse racing), royalty, music hall artists, topographical (named locations) and children.

Advertisements

Advertisements were often hugely ornate, colored or black and white, photographic or artist-drawn. Whatever shape they take, framed and unframed, mounted and unmounted advertisements are very popular on eBay where only recently an advertisement placed by a slave trader in The Memphis Daily Avalanche in 1859 fetched $200.

Clippings

‘Clippings’, sometimes called ‘Cuttings’ as both names suggest, are simply items cut from books and other printed publications. They can be large or small, or even comprise entire sections of a book linked to a specific theme. They can fetch high prices on eBay as did a 1909 article about the magician Houdini that went for $200 in May 2005 and clippings of Rudolph Valentino fetched $305 at around the same time.

Gifts and Advertising Novelties from Early Publications

Early publications often contained useful free gifts for readers, some of which are profitable collectors' items today. The most common free gifts were advertising inserts and sometimes advertising blotters, rulers, children's painting books and maps. Maps are particularly prolific in older books and are amongst eBay's highest priced items, such as the 1873 Beers Atlas of Maps of Long Island New York which recently fetch over $2,000 and a Mitchell's Map of Missouri and Arkansas found folded inside a tatty old book from 1937 that reached $1702.

Posters

Some early publications, larger ones, had double center page spreads that make great posters and prints. They can fetch bids of $20 and more. As for all publications, learn to specialize, and look for special interest magazines, targeting a specific audience, say dog lovers, train enthusiasts, classic cars, and so on. This way you gain experience about specific subjects and the person to buy from on eBay.

Fancy Dress

Another very easy project where all you have to do is look for copyright-free patterns and designs which you can combine into books or sell individually. They are all great sellers on eBay especially for traditional fancy dress anniversaries such as Halloween.

Cartoons

The secret here is to look for copyright-free cartoons which you can copy and mount or frame as they are or revamp to suit today’s market. As for other copyright-free material, although there is no law against lifting and using cartoons, it is arguably immoral and unethical to claim the work as your own.

Cater for Lovers …. Of Anything and Everything!

Actually, that title is a little misleading because this project covers virtually every interest for which there is a large, better still, indeterminate audience. Books and such compiled here can be sold in printed, CD or downloadable fashion on eBay.

This is my particular favorite and, arguably, the easiest to profit from. All you do here is clip, collect and collate as many snippets as you can relating to one particular subject or theme. Cats, dogs, golf, writing, children, Amish recipes, fortune-telling, witchcraft, and more, are useful ideas for books that are simply compilations of everything you find on the topic.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1001 Great Golfing Jokes

Everything You Didn’t Know About Cats

Psychic Cat and Dog Stories

1001 Great Dating Tips

500 Amish Recipes

Candles and Witchcraft: Ten True Stories to Brighten Your Life

50 Ways to Reduce Everyday Stress

101 Ways to Market Your Writing

Early Veterinary Practices

Let Grandma’s Kitchen Make Money For You

There's money to be made from compiling early recipes in book or report form for selling in print, CD or via email attachment from eBay listings. Recipes don’t need to be popular today; you might research and write up on some of the far less appetizing dishes our ancestors might have ‘enjoyed’ centuries before.

Knitting Patterns

Knitting and other craftwork patterns are hugely popular sellers on eBay, especially unusual and niche market types, such as dolls’ clothing, war-time economy designs, clothes for animals, and so on. Again, look for out-of-copyright items and other patterns that never had legal copyright. Many old publications included free patterns as loose items or pull-out publications which need no additional work on them to sell. However, you are not always allowed to copy these items so where you have a good seller, work hard to obtain as many copies of the parent copy publication as possible.

So many books and magazines available, so many ways to make money from them, so what are you waiting for!

Avril Harper is a triple PowerSeller and author of Mags to Riches (http://www.magstoriches.com) http://www.magstoriches.com. She has produced a free guide - 103 POWERSELLER TIPS - which you can download with other freely distributable reports and ebooks at http://www.toppco.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Avril_Harper

Amazon stops access to buyer e-mails

It seems Amazon is finally clamping down on access to buyer e-mails addresses. I can think of a few legitimate reasons they've done it -- I'm sure they get frequent complaints because of sellers sending spam (on purpose) or viruses (by accident, I hope).

But there's no doubt about it, customer service is going to suffer because of this. The Web-based contact forms we're supposed to use now to contact customers are really not adequate.

The buyer e-mail addresses are still available from inside the "Sold Ship Now" e-mails and through your payments account on Amazon's site. But it appears that Amazon is moving toward a system where all buyer/seller contact will need to go through a Web-based contact form.

Here's a good perspective on this issue from a regular reader, Ribanna's Books:

It is posing all kinds of problems.

I will now have to squeeze my highly personalized shipping confirmation email into their little square box. I am a small bookseller and my business thrives on highly personalized customer service and emails with a personal, yet professional touch. I now feel like a little Mom and Pop place just having been taken over by some large corporation. I am no longer allowed to fly my own colors, but are forced to use their impersonal corporate form to provide my highly personalized customer service, which supposedly distinguishes me from the big corporate giants. ???!!!

How can this work? Isn't this some kind of contradiction in terms to handicap the small service providers to carry out what they do best, i.e. personalized customer service?

Whereas the uniformed look might work for their corporate image (and Borders), it definitively does not work for small personal businesses, which is what most of their Marketplace sellers are. And this is the niche we are supposed to fill. Why can't they let us to our job and provide something Amazon does not provide?

Is it really too unsafe? Everybody has the chance to create an email address
just for mail ordering if they are concerned with safety. Besides, withholding email addresses might be a smart move in the name of increased safety, but does that mean we have to be squeezed into a form? Do these two things need to go together? A blank page would have done the job much better.

At least Amazon should allow us to write our own headings to make it more personal.

Which takes me to problem 2: Out of the 10 emails I will be sending out to my customers this morning, already the first 3 needed a heading which Amazon had not thought of. What do I select?!

To give an example, I urgently had to tell the customer that his book slightly differs from my description (I discovered a name stamp inside, I omitted to mention in my item description). Before I get the customer's okay on this, I cannot ship out his book. So I am holding back his book.

"Additional order information" as a heading in no way conveys the urgency of this situation. If this customer is like many of us, a busy person and receives many, many emails a day, he's not going to pay any attention to an email with this lame heading. He's going to dismiss this as some Amazon form letter confirming his order.

I need a heading that has words like "urgent" and "please contact me or your book cannot ship", "shipper has question regarding your order" to successfully get the customer's attention in this matter.

The other 2 emails were similar problems, where the heading does not address the problem I am contacting the customer about. That's already 3 out of 10
on the very first day.

I am an ardent believer in contacting customers to remove their negative feedback (and this includes 4 stars). It works 80% of the time and helps me to maintain my feedback. I invested a huge amount of time and effort into devising just the right kind of message and improving it over and over until I got it just right. This includes the heading! It needs to be just right to capture people's attention so they will actually open the email, but not too pushy.

Having to revert to a corporate form from Amazon with a lame heading (which heading? "feedback request"?!) is just not going to cut it. If Amazon needs to severely handicap the way our own personal business emails will look in the future, at least they need to let us write our own headings.

At least half of my bad feedback is already a direct result of Amazon's complicated system that leaves customers upset and confused. Now they've introduced another level of confusion. Bravo!

Bookstream wholesaler up and running

BookStream, a new wholesaler offering a 42 percent discount off new books with no minimums and free freight, has opened for business.

More details from Shelf Awareness:

BookStream, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., wholesaler that has been quietly selling to some booksellers in the Northeast, is "at a point now where the title base is adequate and growing all the time and the fulfillment rate is good enough for us to announce we're open for business," president Jack Herr said. BookStream began limited operations late last year (Shelf Awareness, September 8, 2005).

BookStream offers two-day shipping from Maine to Ohio to North Carolina with free freight and no minimums. The company is emphasizing its 42% discount on all orders, aimed at "leveling the playing field for all booksellers and eliminating any kind of subsidy for larger booksellers," as Herr put it. "Our business principle of fairness has resonated incredibly positively among booksellers, even the larger stores who support the idea of having their smallest colleagues have a reasonable and level playing field on which to compete."

The company is "up and running" with WordStock, IBID, Anthology, Square One and Book Log and is talking with Books in Store, Herr said.

The "crucial" aspect about the opening announcement, Herr continued, is that "we're here in business. We've overcome some hurdles and demonstrated we have the financial stamina to make this go and will continue to do so."

BookStream is located at Poughkeepsie Business Park, 900 Dutchess Turnpike, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12603; 866-416-1112 or 845-452-4042; fax 845-452-7968. The company's Web site is bookstream.com.

Amazon will host your e-commerce site free

A little birdie from Seattle dropped this bombshell in my ear this morning, but I still didn't believe until I saw it here with my own eyes.

That's right, Amazon is offering free Web hosting of your e-commerce bookstore. Or you can sell any other kind of merchandise except the usual prohibited stuff like firearms and pornography.

Amazon hasn't announced this program yet. It's still in beta, but you can sign up here.

I've got to admit, I never saw this coming. It's a bold move by Amazon, and a huge counterpunch to eBay's Stores program, which costs at least $14.95. The barriers to entry to e-commerce are just about gone now. The only remaining obstacles for Joe Six-Pack having his own Web store are monthly hosting fees and the hassle of getting your own domain. With this offer, Amazon eliminates both those headaches for you -- you just give them the name of your company and the URL you want to use.

And not only that, Amazon will collect the payments for you, so no need for you to fiddle with PayPal or paying a big application fee for your own credit-card merchant account.

Believe it or not, it gets even better: Amazon is thinking about offering to warehouse and ship your goods too. My understanding is this part of the program hasn't been finalized, but it's part of the plan.

Looks like Amazon is targeting every kind of merchant under the sun, not just booksellers. Here's one of the pilot stores, a Web site that sells waterproof bedding. Other pilot stores are selling coffee, auto accessories, flowers -- a big variety.

Now this program won't automatically generate traffic to your e-commerce site -- that's still your job. But here's the great thing about it: Say a visitor to your site buys your item. During the checkout process, they see related merchandise from another Amazon seller. You can get an affiliate commission (probably about 6.5 percent) on that additional sale. To get these additional commission, you'll need to sign up for Amazon's Associates Program separately.

One more thing: The word I hear is that Amazon will tie this new program into its plans for pay-per-click advertising. In other words, if you're paying Google to bring in customers using Adwords, Amazon is going to go after that business too.

So Amazon isn't just trying to one-up eBay here, it's trying to outdo Google too. Awesome!

eBay seller gets $1557 for 'Cat in the Hat'

The top 10 valuable children's books sold on eBay during May averaged nearly $3200 apiece. The top seller (nearly $9000!) was an original British edition of "Little Black Sambo" and rounding out the top 10 was a First Edition of Dr. Seuss' "Cat in the Hat," which brought in a cool $1557.

Get the full rundown here on Elaine's eBay Bookseller Blog.