QUESTION: I’ve been selling books on Amazon for the past year and a half, and am concerned about sales. Is there a downward trend now in online book sales ? In your book “The Home-Based Bookstore,” you predicted a “bumpy ride” for booksellers when e-books arrived on the market. Are we there yet?
About a year ago, I was selling more than 20 books per month. I’ve enlarged my inventory, but sales have dropped off to only a few each week. I keep my prices adjusted, and expected to be selling more by this time. Are sales for other sellers dropping off?
ANSWER: Here are some back-of-the-envelope opinions based on what I’ve been able to observe as a bookseller and as someone who has closely watched the trends regarding paper vs. Kindle sales for books I’ve written. I’m interested in hearing other opinions, too.
In general, I think the trend has been down for book sales since 2006, partly because of the economy — and partly, I’m guessing, because the average person is reading fewer books per year because they are doing other activities during their free time. (The booksellers we’re speaking of are mostly self-employed, Internet-only booksellers, for which there aren’t any reliable statistics. On the other hand, it’s pretty obvious that brick-and-mortar booksellers — chains and independents — have been consolidating, going bankrupt, or closing left and right. Look at the local Yellow Pages listings for bookshops from a few years ago, and a big portion of them will be closed.)
On top of that, I think there has been a pronounced effect from e-books, especially on fiction, during the past couple of years, and the past year especially. When I started selling books, I generally ignored fiction because it seemed it required so much more effort to find a fiction book that could be profitably resold. Yet I still stumbled onto enough of them to earn perhaps 20% of my sales from hardcover fiction books (popular stuff, not collectibles) that I was able to resell for a good $8 each gross profit before the paperback edition came out.
As a reseller of used books, it’s been many moons since a hardcover fiction book has hit my radar. A big part of that must be the shift toward people reading fiction on their Kindles. So far, it’s just a sliver of the market, but the trend is obvious. And my guess is that the curve will continue, and feed upon itself. The more that the e-reading trend continues, the fewer times publishers are going to even bother with a hardcover edition because, on average, it won’t be as good an investment for them. A good analogy in the entertainment business would be the trend toward Cable TV movies — “straight to video” instead of the film company bothering with the box office and distributing to movie theaters. For books, in the next few years, I think the trend will be “straight to paperback” for all but the A-list, popular authors, the ones you see in an airport bookstore and the front tables at Barnes & Noble. Mostly fiction.
And then if the trend toward e-reading continues on its current curve, trade paperback editions will probably become more infrequent, too. And perhaps someday, only bestsellers will ever be printed on paper.
So in that light, it’s a bleak situation, but the other side of the coin is that collectibles will be even more rare and, I would guess, keep rising in value like they’ve been doing the past 20 years, only faster. Nobody is ever going to “treasure” a Kindle book.
However, the other side of the book business, nonfiction books, are going to be around indefinitely, if you ask me. Most nonfiction readers, a healthy majority, from what I can guess, still want to hold the book. They want to be able to underline it, dogear it, and put it on their shelf so they can grab it again any time — no batteries or power cord required. Amazon’s Kindle hype notwithstanding, an e-book doesn’t offer that same utility.
Generally, I think sales rebounded nicely this past holiday season. So I’m very optimistic about online selling in general for the foreseeable future, because I think the economy is going to be on an upward curve for several years because we’ve been in the tank for a while. Unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever get back to that same kind of market we had about 10 years ago, where e-commerce and online book ordering had matured, yet e-book sales were virtually insignificant. That was a pretty good sweet spot for online booksellers.
Amazon recently announced that third-party sales were booming. But that doesn’t provide any proof that more sellers earning money at this, or that the pie (for books) is expanding as fast as the pool of sellers. And I would wager that, yes, the average bookseller’s sales are down for the past couple of years, unless they’ve managed to diversify into other kinds of products, or they’ve discovered a great new source of book inventory.
bookselling
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Q&A: Should I notify my previous Amazon buyers when I have new merchandise for sale?
QUESTION: You recently pointed out the hazards of Amazon’s long-term storage fee for FBA items. As a relatively new participant with Fulfillment by Amazon, I’ve been considering this, and wondered about ways to mitigate it. One idea I had was to send email (or maybe a post card) to all previous buyers, with a coupon code. I note that Amazon has this ability in the seller tools.
I was thinking of something along the lines of:
I’m thinking of trying this every couple of months to prevent inventory from getting stale. Seems like it would be better than taking a total loss. Any thoughts on this approach?
ANSWER: In theory it’s a perfectly good idea but I’d approach this with extreme caution. Over the years, Amazon has steadily erected a communications barrier between buyers and third-party sellers. I’ve gotten solicitations like this from several sellers in the past, but nowadays Amazon probably considers this “unauthorized” contact. I believe they’ve added that language to the participation agreement — that sellers may only communicate with buyers regarding the current transaction. I think the main thing they’re worried about is unscrupulous sellers who try to arrange for direct payments (avoiding the 15% Amazon commission) or, worse, are trying to do some type of scam with counterfeit cashier’s checks. So they probably watch new seller accounts very closely, and get nervous is there’s very much messaging traffic between a new seller and buyers.
At some alternative marketplaces — eBay and Etsy come to mind — it’s perfectly fine if you publish a newsletter to previous customers, as long as they opt in to receiving it. And from these marketplaces, you’ll have buyer contact information directly from the marketplace, and from PayPal. There are probably some longtime eBayers and Etsians who generate a ton of sales every time they send out a newsletter to their previous buyers. The downside: those other marketplaces don’t do nearly as good a job at recommending products (and finding buyers for you) as Amazon does.
Here is the official language from Amazon’s section 14b of the seller participation agreement:
So, I think your idea is fundamentally a no-brainer — any good business follows up with previous customers. But in Amazon’s case, I’m afraid you’ve got to rely on Amazon to bring the customer to you. Once they get there, previous buyers will usually remember your seller nickname.
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Bookselling This Week just reported that brick and mortar booksellers are making it easier for self-published authors to garner coveted shelf space in their stores. With indies crossing into this and other territory usually staked out by the ...
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You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed. But you don't even have to go into the store to get a book.
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