Book Pricing – How to Determine Book Values Part 2

So I see you’re still interested in how to determine book values and Part One of Book Pricing didn’t scare you off (or completely bore you…) LOL

So now you want to know where to start in your hunt for how to price your used, collectible and/or rare books.

First things, first, and one of the most important things I’ve found people don’t pay much attention to: asking price is not always selling price or true value. Too many times, I see people selling books offline (brick and mortar stores) that use prices from certain online resources – eBay, Biblio.com, BOOKSAMILLION.COM, Abebooks.com,
Amazon.com, Powell Books and more – that don’t always have a basis in reality, but are based on wishful thinking (or sometimes even typos!) You have to learn how to ‘weigh’ the information, and most times, use more than one source to get as accurate (and realistic) a value you can for your books.

However, as I mentioned before, a book is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and if you find just the right person at the right time, you may get a really high price for a title, but that’s rare and an unreliable way to valuate your books if you’re going to sell on a regular basis. Not to mention, if you have to pay for your listings based on asking price, and they don’t sell, you’ll be wasting a lot of money on listing fees when they don’t sell for those possibly over-inflated prices.

Example: a few years back, A TIME TO KILL by John Grisham was a very hot book, especially when eBay hit its stride, and good, clean copies of the Doubleday 1st printing were selling like hotcakes in the $50-$60 range. (Note: the Doubleday copy ISN’T the true First Edition, even with a full number line of 10987654321, but a First Thus – the first one Doubleday printed – but a lot of selling and buying novices didn’t know that, which helped drive up the prices for a little while.) I had a Canadian buyer who wanted my copy so badly she bid mine up to $102. So other people, using that one sale as an indicator of value, would be sorely disappointed when theirs failed to sell for the same price, especially if it wasn’t in the same or better condition than my copy and there wasn’t another buyer at that time as desperate to get a particular copy.

So exactly how would you decide what price to sell that book or any other for? (Especially if you didn’t understand any of the terminology I used in the example… LOL) In Book Pricing – How to Determine Book Values Part 3, I’ll go through a couple concrete examples so you can see some of our methodology.

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