The Auction Seller s Resource Book Scouting 102 A special report for buyers of How To Make Good Money Selling Used Books on ebay, Amazon and the Internet Skip McGrath 08
Book Scouting 102 This is the first in a series of free special bonus report for readers who have purchased How to Sell Used Books on ebay, Amazon, and The Internet by Skip McGrath Copyright 2008 by Skip McGrath and Vision One Press, 1004 Commercial Ave, PMB 223, Anacortes, WA 98221. All rights reserved. This book does not come with resale rights and my not be resold or reprinted in any form without the express permission of the author. Short quotes from the book are allowed for publicity purposes.
Book Scouting 102 Before you read this, you should have read the entire book, How to Sell Used Books on ebay, Amazon, and The Internet, and you may want to re-read chapter 4 which is subtitled Book Scouting 101. As you recall from the main book, a book scout is someone who finds books and sells or trades them to bookstores. Active book scouts are probably the leading source for used book store owners. But, Skip your book is about selling online. Why do I want to sell to book stores? The biggest reason is that you can leverage your book buying by trading up with book store owners. The second reason is that in the course of book scouting you will come across tons of books that could sell at a nice profit but a small dollar amount. Remember, in the main book, I spoke about trying to find books that will sell for $10, $15 or more. But these are a little harder to find. While looking for them, you will come across hundreds of books that could sell profitably for under $10, but do you want to do all the work of listing, selling and shipping for the small increment of money you earn on each transaction. Book scouting is the answer to both of those problems. I will show you how to leverage your sales into greater dollars and how to save yourself hours and hours of time while making the same or even more money. Used Book Stores The first step in learning how to be a good book scout is to learn something about your customers used book stores. In Chapter 4 we learned that book stores give you a choice of cash or trade credit. Book stores operate on very thin cash flow margins. Although they will give you cash for books they also prefer to give trade credit. In fact I have seen stores that will treat you quite differently depending on which one you ask for. For example, you take 10 books into a store. If you ask for cash, the owner 1 will be very 1 Larger stores have buyers specified employees who do all the buying. In a smaller store you are usually dealing with the owner or the store manager who is usually a trusted long term employee.
careful in which book he or she selects. He might only take 2 or 3 of your books. Whereas if you are willing to take trade credit, he or she might take most or even all of your books. The other thing that is important to know about book stores is that they all specialize at least to some degree. One of the book stores in my town will buy almost any paperback novel in good condition, but when it comes to hardbacks they are very-very picky. Paperback fiction is their bread and butter business, but when buying hardbacks they usually only buy history, or regional subjects. They won t buy a fiction hardback unless it is a very hard to find first edition by a famous author. At the other end of town is a book store that specializes in non-fiction. They won t buy any fiction paperback or hardback, but will buy almost any nonfiction book in good condition on a wide variety of topics. In the next town over is a large bookstore that is always looking for hardback 1 st editions of literature especially modern authors. So it is very important to know what each book store looks for. Although used book stores do tend to specialize in specific genres they also have to sell whatever their market wants to stay in business. So often if you go into a book store, the specialty may not be apparent to you. You look around the store and see books on a wide variety of subjects. But when you look further you might notice that the science fiction section or the children s book section is unusually large. So yes, book stores offer what sells in their market, but they also specialize in certain markets. When I was actively scouting books on a regular basis I kept a notebook, with the name of each store, name of the owner or buyer and what types of books they are looking for. You can get this information in one of two ways. Just spend some time walking around the store and looking at the books they stock. Or you can talk to the owner or buyer and ask them what they are looking for. Actually I like to do both. There are two very important reasons to know what book stores specialize in: 1. First of all you will not waste your time or the book store buyer s time by taking books into book stores that they don t want or buy. You want to be on these folk s good side. The first time you walk into a book store with books they don t buy
they will politely tell you that. But if you keep coming in you will find that you are just bothering them. If you regularly bring them books they do want then you could be in a position to one day negotiate a better trade deal. And the dealer will want to keep you happy and will often take a book that he might otherwise not. 2. The second reason is that we are going to show you how to trade up. Remember that book stores specialize. But they still get and stock books they don t specialize in. That is good for you because these books are almost always underpriced and often the owner will negotiate that price. Let s say you visit a shop that specializes in mysteries, but while you are there you notice a copy of One Hundred Years of Landscape Architecture by Simo. If you are up on books about the home and garden category you know that book is worth about $500. But because this store deals in Mysteries, he may sell it for $350. If you are buying with trade credit this is a real bargain as you will see when we dissect the economics of trading. So by learning the specialties of the book stores in your area, you will save time and aggravation not to mention gas, which is no cheap these days. And you will learn where to buy and trade books on the cheap that allows you to make more money. Trading Up Scouts may be the life blood of book stores, but the person they really like is someone who is both a scout and a customer. If you recall, in How to Sell Used Books on ebay, Amazon, and The Internet, I explained how you can take books into a store and take trade credit for them. Then once you have built up a substantial amount of credit, you can buy an expensive book that you can sell on ebay or Amazon for cash. Now if you do this bluntly, book store owners will not like it. Here is what I mean. You bring in tons of inexpensive trade paperbacks for a few weekends and build up a $150 trade credit. Now let s say this store specializes in science fiction and you then go over to the locked case and pick out a signed first edition of Ancient Mirrors: Into Abaddon's
Abyss by Gibson and Anderson. You will just make him mad because it is one of his pride and joys and he likes having it on display and would love to sell it to one of his regular customers. On the other hand if you often trade say when you get to $30 or $40 and you buy a couple of good resalable books, then you are more like a customer. Once you have bought several books, then he is more likely to not mind if you score the occasional very expensive book. In my case, my local bookstores know I collect nautical and maritime history. So, as often as not, I am buying, or using my trade credits to buy those books. So when I use a trade credit to buy an expensive book on the Civil War they don t seem to mind. Book Store Economics You will do much better selling your scouted books of you understand how a book store makes money. The economics actually work well for both parties the scout and the book store. Book store owners have to pay cash for a lot of books, but they really like book scouts and the occasional reading customers who bring books in for trade. Just like you, a book store owner wants to pay a fraction of the selling cost. It may seem unfair to you that a book store would only pay someone walking in 10% of what a book will sell for, but remember that any given book store contains thousands of books many that will take years to sell or may never sell at all. This is why they really like trades. Let s revisit a common trading formula. A typical book store owner will give you 25% of the estimated selling price in cash or 50% in trade credit. You bring in a nice copy of The Joy of Cooking, used in very good condition that the book store estimates they can sell for $20.00. So they give you $10 trade credit. You then use that credit to buy another book for $10 that the owner only gave $5.00 trade credit for. When the book sells his profit is $15.00. How about you? You probably paid $2 for it at a garage sale, so you are getting $10 trade credit. You can stop there and you made a nice profit of $8.00 assuming you spend the credit on a book that will sell for $8.00. But if the book store is in Atlanta and
you spot a book about The Oregon Trail that book is probably way underpriced considering what a buyer in Oregon would pay for it. So you buy the book for $10 in trade credit and sell it on ebay or Amazon for $15, now your profit is $13 not bad. Yes, the book store could have sold it online for the same amount, but in reality they most stores don t do that. Remember that book stores tend to specialize in a specific genre. So they will be more likely to sell the books they know the best if they are selling online. Buying Paperback Fiction If you recall, in the beginning of How to Sell Used Books on ebay, Amazon, and The Internet, I said that you should stay away from fiction and literature as the ins and outs of that business are very complicated and take a long time to learn. If you are so inclined as to do the study and hard work necessary to be successful then go for it. But be aware that it does take a long time and frankly lots of money to really learn and be successful. I have been selling books on and off for about 30 years and yes I have sold a lot of fiction and even some rare books but I have also made a lot of expensive mistakes over the years learning how to do that. Let me stress I am not advising that you don t get into selling fiction and literature I just want you to approach it with your eyes open. There is however, one big exception. When you are out book scouting at garage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, you will have the opportunity to buy current paperback fiction novels. Paperbacks by well known authors are a staple of many bookstores. Often these pay the bills while the store owner is waiting for that 1 st Edition of a John Steinbeck novel to sell for $500. One of the book stores in my town rarely buys a hardback any more, but they make a ton of money selling used paperbacks. The trick is knowing which ones to buy. Mysteries sell best. Spy novels and military novels are a close second. Stick with popular authors and at first until you get to know the genre, stick with fairly recent books. One way to know what authors a book store is looking for is to walk into the book store, go to the mystery section and look on the shelves. What books and authors are on the shelves? This is what the store is selling.
If you would like to see a list of the best selling mystery authors, go to: http://www.mysterynet.com/authors. Another good site is http://www.mysteryauthorsonline.com/authors.html Wikipedia has almost every mystery author listed and you can click on the authors name to see a list of their books and learn more about them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_mystery_writers#content After you look on the shelves, take a few minutes to ask the book store owner what he is looking for. He might say that he is always on the lookout for Rex Stout or Patricia Cornwell or Nelson DeMille. Write those names in your notebook and keep your eyes open for them. Now remember, you don t want to sell these online. What you are doing here is picking up books that you can get trade credit for. My local bookstore will usually set the selling price of a paperback at 30% to 50% of the cover price. So you buy a book for a quarter at a garage sale and it has a cover price of $6.95. The book store values it at $3.00 and gives you 50% of that in trade credit. So you net $1.50 in trade credit. Bring in 10 books like this and you get $15 in credit. You were already at the garage sale or flea market looking for books to sell online, so why not take a few minutes to grab a few paperbacks you can trade to a bookstore and turn in for trade credit. Then use the trade credit to buy nice books to sell online. Don t forget condition. Book stores are looking for books in relatively good condition. Don t bother with books with torn covers or broken spines or books that look like they have been read by 20 different people. The stores will rarely take these and you will be stuck with them. Remember one of the book scouting lessons from the book. When you are at a garage sale and you don t see any books, don t forget to ask the homeowner if they have any books they would like to sell. People often forget about books when they are holding a garage sale.
Review So let s review what you are doing here and why you are doing it. I can go out every day and find books for a quarter or fifty cents that I could sell for $2, $3 or $4. The problem is that it is a lot of work to list, sell, and ship a book and only get $2 or $3 profit for my effort. If I am making $3.00 per book, I have to sell list, sell and ship 500 books to make $1500. Most of the people who read this book are probably doing this part time or even if you are doing it full time you are working out of your home maybe alone or maybe your spouse is helping you. Yes, $1500 is a lot of money, but do you really have the time to list, sell and ship all of those books? The purpose of Book Scouting is to buy all those cheap books while you are looking for good books. Keep the good books (those that will sell for over $10 or $15) and sell those online yourself. Then trade all the rest to Used Book Stores for trade credit. Now use your credit to trade for a more valuable book. The books you trade for don t have to be really expensive books, although they can be. What you want to trade for are books that are in demand and will move fast. I often trade a few paperbacks for a book that will sell for $15 or $20. If you are averaging $10 profit on each sale, now you only have to list, sell and ship 150 books to make the same $1500.