Q&A: What selling approach is best for contemporary books, versus antiquarian books?
QUESTION: I collect and sell vintage children's picture books and other more eclectic hard-to-find vintage interest titles (sports, art, gay literature, etc). What do you see as the major differences in selling approaches between newer contemporary titles versus collectible vintage and antiquarian books? Is there ever an advantage to auctioning a vintage title rather than selling at a fixed price? Is there ever an advantage to listing vintage titles in lots?
ANSWER: Those are great questions. I don't have great answers, but I'll take a stab at it. And I hope other readers will chime with some "comments" below.
Undoubtedly, online bookselling has expanded the market for nostalgia items. This includes books appealing to baby boomers, reminding them of childhood. Amazon and eBay expose lots more people to the idea of buying nostalgia items. Many of these buyers would never have taken the initiative (in pre-Internet days) to go to a collector's show, shop, or catalog to buy such things. But after stumbling across these items online, they buy.
I think the contemporary stuff requires less preparation, fewer selling skills, and less creativity. And many of these buyers aren't necessarily building a collection they hope will be worth a certain value.
I've never actively pursued collectibles. So I've never auctioned any rare books on eBay, but I've sold a ton of high-priced scarce titles on Amazon, along with a few marginally collectible books I've gotten by chance.
I'm not a big fan of online auctions. So often it seems the seller wants an unrealistically high price, while the buyer wants an unrealistically low price. Live auctions conducted by a professional are much more palatable for me, even when the item up for bid is a piece of junk.
Perhaps I prefer fixed-price selling mainly because Amazon Marketplace is my normal mode of operating. But I see these advantages:
-- You set the price and wait for a buyer to meet you there
-- No fees are incurred until after the item sells
An advantage with eBay in the past has been that you could list any item, no matter how obscure. To sell on Amazon, the book needed to have an ISBN. Now, however, Amazon enables Pro-Merchant sellers to add books without ISBNs into Amazon's catalog. I think this will enable Amazon to capture a much larger share of the collectible book market in the future.
I'll construct a hypothetical example to illustrate why I think fixed-price collectible book sales will increase on Amazon. Let's say you have a book printed in 1950 that isn't very rare. But your copy is signed by the author AND a friend of the author whose signature is rare. What would happen if you listed this book on eBay for a 10-day auction? It might be seen by a few hundred people and you'd get a few dozen bids. Whether the ending price was to your liking is totally left to chance.
Now, Let's say you listed this book at a fixed price on Marketplace. You set the price at which you're happy to sell, the highest range you think is reasonable. And instead of hoping to find a buyer within 10 days, your item is for sale indefinitely on Marketplace. Because Google and other search engines index each Amazon product page, your book might be found by anyone searching for the names and words in your listing -- whether they were shopping for a book or not.
There is a limit to how much you can do online, though. There's a point -- perhaps $800 or $1,000 -- where people resist buying a collectible they can't inspect in person first. And perhaps there's a midway point -- around $400 or $500 -- where you can sell it online, but you really have to know how to sell -- you need the freedom to write 1,000 words and include a dozen pictures. So for that, perhaps an eBay store would be handy -- you can't get very creative on Amazon.
On your question about listing vintage titles in lots: In some cases, you can sell more effectively with a "lot." Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts -- but this usually happens when some of the parts are weak by themselves. For your outstanding items, avoid distractions.
ANSWER: Those are great questions. I don't have great answers, but I'll take a stab at it. And I hope other readers will chime with some "comments" below.
Undoubtedly, online bookselling has expanded the market for nostalgia items. This includes books appealing to baby boomers, reminding them of childhood. Amazon and eBay expose lots more people to the idea of buying nostalgia items. Many of these buyers would never have taken the initiative (in pre-Internet days) to go to a collector's show, shop, or catalog to buy such things. But after stumbling across these items online, they buy.
I think the contemporary stuff requires less preparation, fewer selling skills, and less creativity. And many of these buyers aren't necessarily building a collection they hope will be worth a certain value.
I've never actively pursued collectibles. So I've never auctioned any rare books on eBay, but I've sold a ton of high-priced scarce titles on Amazon, along with a few marginally collectible books I've gotten by chance.
I'm not a big fan of online auctions. So often it seems the seller wants an unrealistically high price, while the buyer wants an unrealistically low price. Live auctions conducted by a professional are much more palatable for me, even when the item up for bid is a piece of junk.
Perhaps I prefer fixed-price selling mainly because Amazon Marketplace is my normal mode of operating. But I see these advantages:
-- You set the price and wait for a buyer to meet you there
-- No fees are incurred until after the item sells
An advantage with eBay in the past has been that you could list any item, no matter how obscure. To sell on Amazon, the book needed to have an ISBN. Now, however, Amazon enables Pro-Merchant sellers to add books without ISBNs into Amazon's catalog. I think this will enable Amazon to capture a much larger share of the collectible book market in the future.
I'll construct a hypothetical example to illustrate why I think fixed-price collectible book sales will increase on Amazon. Let's say you have a book printed in 1950 that isn't very rare. But your copy is signed by the author AND a friend of the author whose signature is rare. What would happen if you listed this book on eBay for a 10-day auction? It might be seen by a few hundred people and you'd get a few dozen bids. Whether the ending price was to your liking is totally left to chance.
Now, Let's say you listed this book at a fixed price on Marketplace. You set the price at which you're happy to sell, the highest range you think is reasonable. And instead of hoping to find a buyer within 10 days, your item is for sale indefinitely on Marketplace. Because Google and other search engines index each Amazon product page, your book might be found by anyone searching for the names and words in your listing -- whether they were shopping for a book or not.
There is a limit to how much you can do online, though. There's a point -- perhaps $800 or $1,000 -- where people resist buying a collectible they can't inspect in person first. And perhaps there's a midway point -- around $400 or $500 -- where you can sell it online, but you really have to know how to sell -- you need the freedom to write 1,000 words and include a dozen pictures. So for that, perhaps an eBay store would be handy -- you can't get very creative on Amazon.
On your question about listing vintage titles in lots: In some cases, you can sell more effectively with a "lot." Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts -- but this usually happens when some of the parts are weak by themselves. For your outstanding items, avoid distractions.
posted by Steve Weber at 3/15/2006
3 Comments:
I never sell antiquarian books on Ebay unless there is good evidence in the ebay items sold search that the item will get a lot of bidders and a high price.
Listing on Amazon and other book sites will almost always get a higher price. You may have to wait 6 months to 2 years to sell the item.
One way to sell antiquarian books on ebay at a fairly inexpensive cost is to utilize the ebay store feature. ebay is giving these books greater visibility lately and they do sell. The latest issue of the BookThink newsletter, www.bookthink.com, discusses this to some extent.
How we have been handling things lately hits upon this entry in a couple of ways. 1) Our experience with Amazon.com catalog page creation has been frustrating and usually is unsuccessful (for various reasons) AFTER having invested the time to enter as much detail as possible!!, 2) We were going to cancel our unused eBay Store ($16/month), but instead have been experimenting with putting our "advanced" listings there. These are the ones that will not straight-forward list on Amazon.com (our preferred if we can get it), but checking value at sites such as abebooks shows that it does have a worthwhile value, or it is so rare, yet should be valued by someone... but the Internet doesn't seem to know it exists (this always amazes me). These we list on eBay as fixed price ("buy it now" with the "make an offer" option set) for prices that will hopefully make the extra effort worthwhile. Well, too early to tell if this is a good idea, but it might be worth your readers to consider as an alternative.
There are further details to the idea, but maybe that would be better at our blog: http://www.briteday.biz
Thanks, Steve!
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