Amazon announced the launch of their Rare & Collectible Books Store yesterday.  One nice thing about the launch is that any book you had listed as “collectible” correctly is automatically listed in it.  Time will tell if the store is going to help sellers sell more collectible books, but there are already 2 things that I like about the concept.

1. Sellers who randomly list books in the Collectible category without it meeting the guidelines will not be listed in the new store.
2. When a buyer searches for a book – the Collectible copy(s) show up first in the listings… I think sometimes buyers don’t notice the Collectible tab in normal searches if there are plenty of Used copies available.

I’m going to check and see if all of my Collectible books are listed in the stores and I will keep you updated on any trends I notice with the store.

If you’ve been selling books on Amazon for any period of time there is no doubt that you’ve seen some of your high value books spiral down in price because of DUMB sellers fighting to have the lowest price.

My question is WHY would you want to have the lowest price on Amazon?  What these sellers obviously don’t realize is that there are 2 major factors to consider when pricing a book -

1. Sales ranking
2. Book supply

Without giving  a lesson in Sales ranking – basically if you are selling a book with a low sales ranking (1,000,000 or higher as a rule of thumb), only so many copies of that book are going to sell per year regardless of price… if a book’s value is around $100 and about 1 person is looking for that book every 2 months… it doesn’t matter if you price the book at $10 – NO ONE is looking for it.  You are just lowering your profit when you do sell it.

Book supply – if there are 50 copies of the book you are selling, then yes, you may have to lower your price to get it sold at some point… if there are 2 or 3 copies, you may be able to stand pat.

I read an interesting article recently about something that I’ve always known but never thought about…. condition description.  If you look around at your competition, most of those books have no or very poor description about the book’s condition.  Most say something like “standard used condition” or “thousands of satisfied buyers”.  These descriptions don’t mean jack to the buyer but could be a tremendous advantage for you.  When listing a book I scroll down through the prices and past all of the generic descriptions and place my price and description where a buyer might actually buy because I’ve described the condition.

Just a couple things to consider if you are a DUMB Amazon seller diluting the prices of books for no good reason.

Believe it or not, the micro-blogging site Twitter can actually be used for a more useful purpose than tweeting about what you had for lunch. There’s a couple ways that you can use it for your advantage for book selling – Twitter won’t revolutionize your business but it may help a bit.

In part 1, we will discuss how to use Twitter to find inventory. First, decide if you want to buy from local people only, or if you want to pay to have people ship their books to you via media mail.

If you decide to buy off of local people only, do a search of your city name in the search bar on the right side of Twitter. This will bring up any tweets of your city and there is a good chance that these people live in your city – follow them. Then, go to “Find People” in Twitter and type in your city name in there. Follow these people who have your city name in their nicknames as they probably live in your city as well. Do this over the next few weeks and you should get a good number of followers from your local area.

In your profile, add a description that says something about your interest in buying books (and what kind, year, if applicable). I think my profile says – “I will buy your unwanted books”.

If you decide that you will buy books from people from anywhere and pay for shipping, then you will have an easier time. Just type in words like “book(s)”, “book selling”, “college”, and “make money” into both of the search bars mentioned above. You should be able to get a steady stream of followers who may want to sell their books to you in no time.

Once you have some followers, post periodic tweets about your interest in buying books. I usually tweet something like, “Need extra CASH? I buy books – any genre – direct message me for more details”.

I’ve gotten a few messages this way about books and have found a few people locally that I’ve bought from as well.  I hope this helps you get started using Twitter as another source for acquiring inventory – in part 2 I will show you how to use Twitter to help sell your books!

If you are just starting out in the online book selling business and are wondering where to start looking for inventory – library book sales are the answer.  With spring approaching there are going to be thousands of them all over the country and there will probably be some close to your home.  When you are at your local library ask them if they have a book sale and when it is – most major libraries have at least 2 a year.  You can also check the site BookSaleFinder.com to search for sales in your area or to find big sales that you would like to travel to.

Many booksellers believe that the key to finding great inventory is to attend the “preview” sale – usually the night before the public sale begins.  To attend the preview sale you need to be a FOL (Friend of the Library).  You can usually become a member at the door for a nominal fee of $10-$30 a year.  You will more than cover the cost of the fee with the books you find at this preview sale.  If you are new to book selling the preview sale might be a little overwhelming as you will be competing with other booksellers and there will be thousands of books to choose from.

I always attend the preview sales at library sales but this year I am trying a new strategy since I am listing most of my books with Amazon Fulfillment now.  With Amazon Fulfillment, I am more concerned with the speed a book is going to sell over the amount of money the book will sell for.  The beauty of this is that you can actually make  money selling every day run-of-the-mill paperbacks.  With this in mind, I am starting to put more emphasis on attending the final day of the library sale when the books are at their cheapest… many times they are a dollar a bag.  You can still find fast selling books of low value on the last day that your competing book sellers don’t care about.

If you want to look into the Amazon FBA program more – check out the ebook Book to the Future.  This ebook is short and simple and shows you how to make money right away with FBA!