Starting Up Your Bookstore

I’ve had a number of people ask me what service is the best to use when they’re starting up their online book selling business.

eBay.com, Amazon.com, Biblio.com, AbeBooks.com, Alibris.com, etc are all good channels to offer your books on. When you are just starting out, you need as many options as possible in order to get your books to potential buyers. In those terms, I recommend listing your inventory on all of them.

I am not a lover of paying fees however I personally have opted for the channels where I am charged a percentage of the book selling price rather than having to cough up $10 or $20 a month to list my books.

I’ve also setup my own online store so I could then use other marketing channels like Craigslist.org, InternetBooksellers.net, Kijiji.com, and other free classifieds sites.

With all these services working for me, it makes moving my inventory a little easier. I have heard online sellers say to sell a book a day, you need to have 1,000 to 2,000 listed. I’m working on the theory that if I have each book listed in 10 places, I will only need 100 books in my inventory

Please let me know if you find this useful! Just email your comments to paul [A  T] booksellingonlineblog [d ot] com

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MySpace a Good Space For Selling Books?

I recently setup an account for Book Selling Online Blog on MySpace - for a couple of reasons.

1. I was embarrassed I hadn’t already hooked BSOB up on MySpace (Even though I’d already designed a system very similar to MySpace about a year and a half ago)
2. BookThink recently announced they were using it as a sales and networking tool
3. To finally be one of the cool kids

Here is what BookThink had to say about their move onto MySpace:

“Steve Weber’s new book, Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors, Book Publicity Through Social Networking [sic] devotes an entire chapter to how to market, among other things, a book you’ve authored – and “among other things” necessarily includes promoting your bookselling business – on MySpace. If you’re harboring a notion that MySpace is nothing more than a meeting place teeming with hormone challenged teenagers, let me take this opportunity to disabuse you of it. MySpace is fast becoming an unusually effective tool for business networking – including bookselling. Consider joining today and becoming one of BookThink’s MySpace friends. ”

I couldn’t agree with BookThink more, and Anita, from Ashland Book Company is editing and maintaining the MySpace stream on behalf of BookThink.

If you’re not already on MySpace, I cordially invite you to join

Then you can visit our MySpace places and start building your own networks:

BookSellingOnlineBlog on MySpace

BookThink On MySpace

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AbeBooks Not Books Campaign

Having a background in Advertising and Marketing (at one point I was a copywriter - if you can believe my spelling mistakes ), I must say I appreciate ABEBOOKS latest campaign.

The premise is simple, if they do not have the title listed for sale, then it does not exist. To prove their point, they are trying to generate an e-card campaign with witty non-existant book titles. Here are just a couple of examples:

Making Marriage Work By HenryVIII

Whoops, I was wrong By G.W. Bush

1985 Things Are Looking Up By G. Orwell

I think this will generate a significant amount of organic traffic for Abe Books and hopefully give all us folks with our inventory listed there a little boost in our sales

To see or send one of these new e-cards, click here!

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