There are no secrets to online bookselling or to being a successful online bookseller, but there are many lessons that can be quite expensive to learn by trial and error. My suggestion for anyone contemplating becoming an online bookseller would be to get a detailed book about the business and learn all you can before starting. If you are already an online bookseller it would not hurt you to pick up a couple books on the subject for ideas and tips to being more profitable.
There are only so many things that a book about online bookselling can tell you, so look for one that is detailed, comprehensive, and explicitly states that it includes the personal learning experiences of the author. Almost all of the will tell you how to buy, price, and grade books as well as where to sell them, but you don't even need a book to tell you these things. Some books rely on "secret" lists of wholesale and remainder book distributors to sell their books, but I consider these lists worthy of mention in the appendices only because finding these distributors is not too difficult on the Internet. What is not free are the personal experiences and tips offered in some books. These are things that booksellers learned the hard and expensive way, selling them in a book is a means of offsetting the losses for the author and helping others avoid the cost of learning them by experience. It really is a win-win scenario because both the buyer and the seller of the information come out ahead.
Much of the online bookselling mystique is attributable to not knowing where to start. The fundamentals of learning how to do it are easy, but if they are not applied properly the cost of making the mistakes are more than financial, they can be stressful, de-motivating, discouraging, and ultimately they can result in one giving up. I can personally speak to this from experience as my initial attempts resulted in buying a lot of expensive firewood and negative profits. I turned to an experienced online bookseller, my son, for a few tips to get things going. Five years and thousands of book sales later, I am not only successful, I am the one that friends and friends of friends are asking about how to do it.
Recently when I was out book scouting I had a woman in her late 50's start asking me a lot of questions about what I was doing. She told me she was interested because she had a large collection of books that she was interested in having someone sell for her. As our conversation progressed it became apparent that she was really trying to learn as much as she could about online bookselling because she was considering getting into the business. That is when I went into a discussion about generalities only because she was interrogating me to tell her what cost me a lot of time and money to learn. I offered her my business card and told her that if she wanted to have me look at her collection and possibly sell it for her on a consignment basis, I would be happy to meet with her. I also pointed out that conveniently printed on my card is a link to my book about online bookselling should she happen to be interested in going into the business.
I am happy to discuss the business with anyone in general terms, and even in specific terms when the same information is available to anyone with the ambition to do some research. This is what most books about online bookselling have put between their covers, i.e., what is available to all that are willing to do a little research. What I am unwilling to freely share are the things I paid time and money to learn, and that is no different than how things are done in any other business. As I said before, there are no secrets to online bookselling, but you are not likely to find the information and insight to being successful for free because the source probably put his/her time and money into learning these things from experience.
To read more about online bookselling, visit =>http://www.online-bookselling.com
Michael E. Mould is the author of "Online Bookselling: A Practical Guide with Detailed Explanations and Insightful Tips," (ISBN 1599714876) published February 2006.
If you have additional questions, please contact Michael at:
mike@online-bookselling.com