How much should you pay for your inventory of used books? If I’m buying a book purely for the resale value, I try to pay no more than $1 apiece for books. I’ll buy a box of books for $5 or $10 without looking up the prices. It’s hard to get into serious trouble when you’re spending only a few dollars per book. As long as you’re observing some basic ground rules, like:
- No dog-eared Oprah paperbacks
- No 50-lb. cartons of Time-Life books
- No yellowed book club editions
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. But a good rule of thumb is to try to triple your money when acquiring stock. If you can do this, you’ve got a great business. Remember that commissions, shipping costs, and items that don’t sell will cut into that margin. But like every rule, there are exceptions. If you find a book you know you’ll be able to sell quickly at $100, do not hesitate to pay $60 to get it. It’s a lot easier to make $40 on one sale than making $5 on eight separate transactions.
Nobody bets right all the time, and no matter how good you are at picking books you will inevitably accumulate some losers and pass up winners, if you’re just working with hunches. However, now it’s possible to research book prices even while you’re at a sale if you have a Web-enabled cellphone. You can even hook up a scanner to some of these phones so you don’t need to type in the ISBNs. This type of tool can take some of the pure joy out of finding a great books through serendipity, but it can also help your bottom line.
If you can check prices online, then this opens up lots more possibilities. For example, if a book sells pretty well on Amazon for $150 (and the sales rank is less than 200,000) then I’ve got no qualms about paying $50 cash for it.
I’ve gotten a lot pickier over the years because I’ve learned what a chore it can be to weed out the losers from your stock. Once you run out of storage space, then you’ve got to figure out which of your books are worth less than X dollars, which haven’t sold within X months, then gather them up and get rid of them. It’s much less fun getting rid of books than it is getting fresh ones to sell.
Of course, if most people start buying e-books, all bets are off. Readers and sellers will have a whole new decision-making process.
http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fbookcycling-20%2F8010%2F5a436557-827f-4872-a7b0-b603f56f5592&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate
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4 Comments
One thing to keep in mind when selecting books is the Amazon rank is like a snapshot of how well a book sells at a given moment. I try not to rely too heavily on rank – for me, it is only a guide. If you have ever sold a book with a rank in the millions and check the rank a few days later you may see it moved to a much lower number.
For example, the other day I sold ISBN 0970040245 which at the time of listing had a “0″ ranking – no number associated with it; today it is #374,153.
I believe condition and scarcity are more important than rank. If you have the best copy available, great customer feedback, and a reasonable price [not necessarily the lowest], your copy will probably sell relatively quickly – and is worth paying extra for it.
How much to pay? I think Steve’s rule of thumb is right on. Try to pay no more than a third of a book’s selling price. Low value books, I feel, are more of a liability than an asset. If the value is low, it probably means there are many copies available. Unless you know you can make a quick sale, it is probably not worth any investment in the book since with automatic repricers many sellers use the value can drop very quickly. Unlike eBay where auction prices trend upwardly, sellers must remember that Amazon is like a reverse auction with prices for common books racing towards a penny. Often times I remind myself when checking prices on Abebooks or elsewhere that the values listed are prices the book isn’t selling for.
I’ve also become a lot pickier. Because of repricing software, long gone are the days you could simply lowball a book and expect it to sell!
Peter
Minneapolis
Peter,
The sales rank has gone from 0 to 374,153, because YOU sold a copy. YOU put this book up high on the sales rank list. Doesn’t mean it is selling like hot cakes now.
A rank of 0 simply means it hasn’t yet sold on Amazon; that could be because it’s brand new, or because there were no copies available for sale before, so the zero doesn’t give any real info about its chances. On the other hand, if the rank is above 3,000,000 you know it will be a very slow seller.
Dear Anonymous:
Thank you. Maybe I was very unclear. That is exactly my point. A rank in the 300,000s is decent – but it is misleading in the case of the title I sold because I guarantee in a month it will be ranked 1,000,000+, that is, it is not truly a book with a consistent rank in the 300ks [currently slipped to 422,072].
How this creates a problem is that many people scout books with an electronic device. If using a scanner/PDA that has the Amazon database downloaded onto a memory card, that information may, in some cases, be misleading – especially if you don’t update often. If your database download captured the rank of the book I sold when in the 300,000s – you might buy based on that rank – but – later you watch the book slip further and further down in ranking to a more realistic position.
And that is why I use rank [at least when scouting with an electronic device] as a guide only. This relates to how much you would pay for a book because you would most likely pay more for a better seller than a book that will not move quickly.
I’m probably still unclear, but….
Peter
P.S. This makes me think of the website mentioned in Steve’s excellent book, The Home-Based Bookstore: http://www.titlez.com Now, if someone could create a portable hybrid of the price-lookup devices with the information from titleZ that tracks sales performance over time, that would be a powerful scouting tool!!!