The Auction Seller s Resource Book Selection and Pricing for Amazon Sales A special report for buyers of How To Make Good Money Selling Used Books on ebay, Amazon and the Internet Skip McGrath 08
Book Selection and Pricing for Amazon Sales This is the third 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
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Book Selection and Pricing for Amazon Sales Before you read this, you should have read the entire book, How to Sell Used Books on ebay, Amazon, and The Internet. I have had several questions from readers about selecting and pricing their books on Amazon. What happens is they buy a great looking book at a garage sale and when they get home they look it up on Amazon and see that 200 other copies are available at prices from 1 penny to $19.95. So the question is: Should I buy a book if lots of other copies are available and where do I price my book in that range from 1 penny to whatever? Book Selection. The laws of supply and demand work in the book market just like they do with the price of food, oil or any other product. If you are buying books that are very common or were very big sellers in the past few years you will see this. As an example look at the listing below for the popular book, Chicken Soup for The Soul. If you look it says that there are 72 Used and New from $1.29. Now 72 books is a lot of supply. Ideally I look for books where the supply on Amazon is under 50 and under 25 is even better.
When you look at the listing you will see that Amazon charges $3.99 for shipping. But the actual shipping by USPS Media mail is only $2.23. So if a seller sold a copy for $1.29 they would net $1.76 on the shipping in addition to their $1.29 for a total of $3.05 before Amazon fees. Now I have no desire to sell a book at that price. When you are a small seller working from home it just isn t worth it. But if you look, you will see that most of these sellers of low cost books are larger businesses or even book stores. They aren t making much money at this either, but they are doing it to acquire another customer that they can market directly to. Amazon doesn t give you the customer s email but you do get the address. When they mail a book these book sellers will include a catalog, or perhaps even a coupon to visit their web site where they will hopefully buy other books at more of a profit. The other factor is condition. Most of the copies selling for a low price were listed as Good To a serious reader or collector Good is not actually that good. Most readers look for a very good or like new copy. Pricing Strategy When you click on the link to see the other copies and scroll to the bottom you will see the higher priced version. Here is a shot of the top three:
All of these are Very Good or New. So these sellers will get around $4.50 plus the $1.76 net on shipping for a total of $6.26 before fees. I tend to only buy books in Very Good or Like New condition because they sell more quickly and you can price your books at the top of the spectrum. I would probably not buy this particular book because I tend to favor higher priced books, but if I did I would price it as one of the top three or four listings. Here is a little better example. This is a book I sold a while ago: As you can see a new copy sells for $40.95 but there are 56 Used and new from $7.96. My copy was in Like New condition. Here is a listing of the top selling books for this listing.
This is where I would price my book. In this instant I priced it at $22.95 and it sold very quickly. Notice the second listing from the bottom. If you look in the description it says there is a remainder mark on the book. But this book is available from the remainder table in some book stores for as little as $9.99 so that isn t a bad markup. I paid $5.00 for my copy at an estate sale, so I did a little better on it.
So the lesson here is twofold: 1. Try not to buy books of recent vintage that were huge best sellers as there are tons of them on the market. If you do, make sure not to pay more than 25-50 cents because you aren t going to make much on them. 2. Buy better quality books even if you have to pay a bit more and price them at or near the top of the range. When people buy fiction they are looking for one of two things a cheap reading copy or a collectible copy in perfect condition. There are plenty of buyers of non-fiction books who are collectors, but the majority of buyers are not collectors they are people looking for the information. For some reason I don t really understand, these people tend to buy better quality books at the higher end of the price spectrum. Whenever I have books at the low end, they tend to sit there forever. When I have books I can price at the higher end, they tend to sell quickly. So to summarize, look for books where the total number of books listed is under 50 and look for books that are in New, Like New or Very Good condition. Then price your books near the top of the price spectrum. Sales Rank for Books on Amazon There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to sales rank. The term sales rank is a real misnomer. When you see that term you would think that it stood for the rank of the book in terms of total sales, but that is not true. On Amazon, Sales Rank is a measure of recency. You could have a book by a famous author like Tom Clancy or James Patterson that sells hundreds of copies a day and several thousand a month. But a few months ago I listed a book in my newsletter that I recommended and a few hundred people bought it over a three day period
then the sales pretty much stopped. I asked the author and he told me that since he listed the book on Amazon he has sold a total of 700 copies about what a popular James Patterson book with do in one week. Yes, for that three or four day period his book had a sales rank of less than 1000. But once his book stopped selling several a day his sales rank quickly dropped to about 50,000 then eventually to over 300,000. This is a book I had last year that I bought at a library sale for $5.00. Curl Talk: Making glorious mohair wigs for your dolls Paperback February, 1997 by Janet Irvin (Editor), Eva Oscarsson (Editor) javascript:void(0)1 customer review See all formats and editions Paperback from $326.66 1 Used from $326.66 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,490,134 in Books As you can see the sales rank is over 3 million. Yet I sold that book within three weeks of sending it into FBA. Sales rank has some importance in merchandise sold on Amazon but less so in books. With merchandise buyers often browse categories, but with books they tend to search for something specific. The reason is people search for books on Amazon by author, subject and title. If someone types in the correct search term for your book, it is going to come up no matter what the sales rank is. Personally I almost never check the sales rank of a book. I just look for unusual and niche topics or popular topics such as history, transportation and so on send my books in and wait for them to sell.