So, you’ve decided you want to sell books online after all, but need to find out what price you’d have to set on each to make a profit.  So, where do you even start?  Here’s some ideas of how you could get to the numbers you need.

(The following examples are based on selling on eBay as of November 2008, with the fees in effect at that time and the given that only PayPal will be accepted from now on, and are only a guideline.  You’ll need to put in your own actual expenses to get your possible income/profit.)

To keep things easier, I’m working with multiples of 10 or 100 for easier math…  I’ve also figured out the numbers based on the following types of sales: 1 – Listed only in your Basic eBay Store 2 – Listed as an auction 3 – Listed as an auction with a Buy It Now Price also offered 4 – Listed as an auction that failed, then relisted as a store item Let’s say you’ve decided to sell your books for $6.25 with a shipping rate of $3.75 so the customer ends up paying $10.00 for each book.  Here’s what the fees and profit would look like for a single sale based on the current eBay/PayPal fee structures and assuming you could buy all your books for only $1.00 each–not impossible, but getting harder all the time–and that you would pay $2.71 to ship each (the avg postage for a book under 2lbs).

So from the example above, it looks like for every 100 books you sold, you’d make as much as $492 profit.  Wow.  Makes you want to run right and become an online bookseller, right? Unfortunately, there are other factors to consider.  For instance, for every 100 books you sell, you may actually have to list 400.  (Most people would kill for a 25% sell rate on eBay, especially in today’s economy, so I’m probably being a little over-optimistic with that number for a first-time seller with no established reputation and who may or may not be an expert in resellable book titles, but it helps keep my numbers neater.)

Another point – the above calculations don’t take into consideration the recurring monthly fees that you have to pay out of your profits and the cost of all the books that didn’t sell.  Here’s a little more realistic example of what would happen your first month if you purchased 400 books at $1.00 each to sell online:

So, in this example, instead you’ve only made $271 total profit working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, not close to the $500 you thought you’d make, plus you owe more cash than you started with because of the 300 books you purchased, but which didn’t sell yet. Of course, you now have $300 worth of books to try to sell again next month, so you’ll only have to buy $100 worth the next month to reach your 400 listed/month.  That means you may have some cash left at the end of Month 2 not having to put out as much as before, but you still won’t be making more than pocket change at this rate, especially if you figure out how many hours it takes you to accomplish all that.  (It does get better, however, once you have a system and reputation in place – it’s getting them together that can make or break you – working at Taco Bell would probably be more profitable otherwise.)

These examples can be used for other items you want to sell on eBay or anywhere else, too.  You just have to plug in the appropriate fees depending on the items you’re planning to sell to estimate what’s possible, profitwise, and what it will take you to earn it.

Technorati Tags: book pricing, eBay, eBay Books for Sale, Selling Books Online

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.

Technorati Tags: book pricing, determining book values, first editions, rare books

A question I get asked a lot when people find out we sell used, modern first editions, and rare books on eBay is how we set our book pricing, or, in other words, how do we determine book values for the items we sell (and sometimes buy for our own collection).

Whether you’re going to sell books you own, going to search for books to sell, or just want to insure what you have for its actual value, you need to have some way to figure it out, don’t you?

To answer the question about book pricing, I tell them it’s part art and part science.

With millions and millions of books out there, some valuable and quite a few that aren’t (at least not from a resale or even collecting point of view), you need to have a good working knowledge of authors, titles, and trends before you dive in. There are quite a few online resources you can use to help you determine book values, part of what I call the ’science’ part of the process.

However, no one can teach you to have a feel for future trends – I think it’s one of those innate abilities you either have or don’t have – but you can discover what’s currently hot and use that to figure out what the books you have may be worth and try to apply it to what may become hot.

By the way, note I said ‘may be worth’ – that’s where the art part of determining book values comes in. A book is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it and finding that person is more than half the battle… Other extremely important book pricing factors include ‘condition, condition, condition,’ with rarity, popularity, topic and presentation coming in right behind. Another deciding factor is just who and how many people are actually looking for that title at THAT moment. In fact, the rarer the book and the more valuable, the more you have to find a way to make sure the right people with enough money see it if you want to actually get top dollar.

Most of that you’d think was common sense, but I see so many books (and other stuff) offered for sale where the seller hasn’t taken any or all of that into consideration (and probably wonders why they can’t seem to make any money selling online!)

So, if I haven’t scared you off yet of wanting to learn how to figure out what your books may be worth, then check out the next entry Book Pricing – How to Determine Book Values Part 2, where I’ll give you info on the online resources available for doing just that.

Technorati Tags: book pricing, determining book values, first editions, rare books