Selling used books online will be ruined by your book!

QUESTION: You're a bookseller, so why would you possibly want to write a book telling people how to sell books? Why create a blueprint for selling and give away the store? You're biting yourself in the butt. If this book does induce people to enter the business, it will further thin an already diluted pool.

You're also giving potential dealers the wrong impression. At last year's Amazon Sellers Conference, we learned that the growth is starting to level out. Last year for the first time, almost as many sellers quit as those who signed up.

You can't possibly earn enough from your book to offset the revenue you're losing by publishing this information. Are you independently wealthy and just have a perverse pleasure in spoiling what's left of the market for everyone else? I just don't get it.

ANSWER: My intention isn't to "spoil" things for anybody, but to provide information to those who want it. Maybe I'm naive, but I believe my book will actually help my business and everyone else engaged in online bookselling.

I think of selling used books online as a classic free marketplace. To thrive, a marketplace needs lots of buyers and sellers. The more sellers there are, the more choices buyers have. When buyers can find more of what they want, they buy more.

Is it possible to have too many sellers? Yes, I suppose so. But I don't think that's ever likely to happen in this marketplace. Selling used books online is a time-consuming, labor-intensive affair. As I say in my book, this isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, it's hard work. My gut tells me the number of used-book buyers will always vastly outnumber sellers, no matter how easy it is for new sellers to enter the marketplace.

I'm sure you're correct that the signup rate of new sellers on Amazon Marketplace has slowed since its launch a few years ago. But that doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of new sellers entering the marketplace each day who can benefit from advice. And the main advice I give in my book is provide good customer service. Some new sellers lose sight of that, and it's the biggest threat to the marketplace: an erosion of trust. I'll bet that over the past few years, Amazon has permanently lost thousands of longtime, profitable customers after they had one bad experience with a sloppy Marketplace seller. And so we've all lost those customers because of some newbie sellers who weren't prepared to run a business.

So if more new sellers take their business seriously, it will benefit all used booksellers. As more people have good experiences buying used books online, I believe they'll buy more often, and they'll tell their friends about buying used books online. That will expand the pool of buyers faster than new sellers can sign up.

And it's not just neophytes who are interested in learning about selling books online. Of the copies I've sold, many have gone to bookshops. I'm unsure whether they are just now getting into online sales, or trying to improve what they're already doing.

So I'm not worried about people cutting into my business. If my business involved going to every book sale in the country, I would be concerned about "giving away the store." But I can only do so much, I'm limited by my geography just like everybody else in this business. That's what I think is so neat about online bookselling -- the Internet has opened up a worldwide sales platform, but in the end it's still a "cottage business" that's limited somewhat by physical geography. The challenge is to push those limits using your resourcefulness in finding books and taking the initiative to provide a good service.

And no, I'm not "independently wealthy." But I do have more money now than I had before I started selling used books.