Cranking it back up at Amazon

(There must be an association of book Luddites somewhere.)

In spite of the sales of eBooks surpassing those of paper-bound copies, my Amazon Seller account belies this hard fact. In pursuit of the organization of our coming season's reading inventory, I plowed through the heavy boxes to cull the most salable for the mega-website's store. This may sound like an utterly stupid thing to do; yet our book sales are kind of brisk, considering this is the slow time of year for retail in all sectors.

I'm not averse to acquiring a Kindle for myself at some point in the future. But I'm reminded of the advent of the Compact Disc, when all of us vinyl slobs were waiting with baited breath for our stacks and stacks of records to be re-released in this new electronic format. For the most part, those reissues didn't happen, except for the gazillion-selling albums. Everything else got filtered and sifted down into "Best Of" releases and Compilations that missed the point of all those two-sided albums' integrity. So many records in our collections sounded great because we played that whole album all the way through.

(Where am I going here?)

I have that hinky feeling that not all those lovely, keep-til-they-fall-apart quality favorite books currently in our collections will find their way into the eBook format. I fully understand that going forward, the way is on a tablet that I download newly released publications into. I'm also certain that I, and other book lovers, will continue to be keen to get their hands on the pulp and paper, honest to goodness cloth bound or mass market paperback, of their beloved stories from yesterday.

I know this because my book sales prove it. I am doing pretty well selling used books in great condition on Amazon. I don't try to sell poorly cared books, dog-eared or with marked up pages; I like to think that with my books, as I do with the other items in our inventory, only the best preserved are offered. So far this approach is working well.

Amazon Bookselling going great guns

I can't figure out, for the life of me, why some weeks are busier than others. Last week we sold 6 books in 7 days, which I think is a record for us. A couple of the titles I had just added on and they sold the next day. I'm running around 95 titles or so. Every now and then I'll get ruthless with my own bookcases and have a run through them, cull a few out, and put them up for sale. I'm still working through the many cases of books I acquired at the same time I bought all those teapots - but at the moment I'm actually selling more of my own collection than those I'd acquired.

And the nice thing is that I feel perfectly fine buying myself a book here and there, knowing that I can recoup some of the money back later on when I'm finished with enjoying my reading. Some books are "keepers" - I have no intention of selling them on to someone else. But others have languished for ages - I'm unwilling to pitch them into a garage sale as they're "too good" for a 50 cent pile.

The only books that are really impossible to resell at Amazon have been best sellers - there are just such high quantities of them around, and the values get driven down just by sheer volume. But last week I decided to put on a textbook about the honeybee that I'd hung on to for no good reason, except as a reminder that I'd once taken a course at an agricultural college for beekeeping (which I was absolutely dismal at, but really enjoyed doing for the short time it lasted). It sold within a day, to some guy at a genomic biology company in the midwest. Way cool. It had gone out of print.

Meanwhile, back on eCrater, I've been adding more and more items to the store. I got some feedback from another dealer about how I had some of my products categorized - so great to get constructive criticism that I can put to immediate use! I implemented those few changes, updated some of the photos at the store's home page, and have been diligently putting additional Bunnykins china items into the inventory. Oh, and I added specific language in our Terms section that we won't ship orders COD :-)

Darn #@!!$$ Internet!

Say - here's a link to our storefront at Amazon where we've been selling our books - and thanks to the fellow seller on the forum there who suggested I put it here...

I did spend too much time trying to figure out how to add the link as a permanent page element to this blog, unsuccessfully. I tried over and over to add it as a page element, only to have the link not appear. Luckily, though, it only reminded me of an Eddie Izzard discussion about computers that I watched the other day on YouTube, which totally made me laugh out loud.

Sigh. Now my eyeballs are hurting from forgetting to blink! Tine for a break.


Early the next day.... I tried again. Turns out that I needed to give the link a name. (Cyber dope-slap to the forehead.) Now it works great! Thanks again to the seller on Amazon who walked me through the maze to get there. I will link to his blog and sites too.