Q&A: Should I trash this slow-selling book?
QUESTION: About six months ago I purchased 500 copies of a book at a library sale, all new in the carton. It's a nice Civil War hardcover but a slow seller -- the Amazon Sales Rank is 850,000-plus. It's being sold on Amazon for $5 in like-new condition. I'm not sure it would be practical to keep them -- or try selling them at $5. Should I destroy most of the books and keep just a few? I don't want to make the market worse by donating them.
ANSWER: This is a tough call. I never like to see books destroyed -- especially good ones!
If storage isn't a critical concern, I'd consider holding onto them. You might find some use for them, and there's a remote chance they'll recover in value.
But I wouldn't recommend beating your brains out to sell them for $5 apiece on Marketplace. It's not worth your time, plus -- as you probably know -- cheap listings attract lots of problem customers. The person who pays $5 for a $30 book tends to be the same person who complains about paying $3.49 for shipping, and leaves you negative feedback when the Postal Service takes three weeks to deliver the book.
With a sales rank over 800,000, this book is only selling a few copies a year on Amazon. So the price isn't likely to recover soon.
You might be able to unload some of these books on eBay. If you wrote up a long description using lots of unique keywords from the book's introduction, you might be able to find some buyers -- people who were looking for Civil War memorabilia but accidentally find your book.
Or you might be able to use this book as a giveaway in an eBay Store, especially around the holidays -- "Buy any of my books and get this one free, makes a great gift."
Or you might be able to sell them in a bulk lot in eBay's wholesale books category. You might find somebody who'd like to buy them for a school or a library system.
And it's always possible the book will be in demand someday. If the author is able to write a new book that sells well, demand could really shoot up for the earlier book. I've seen Marketplace prices double or triple within weeks when an author comes out with a new bestseller. When that happens, Amazon usually recommends the author's previous books, and all the low-priced listings on Marketplace are snapped up immediately.
It would be a shame to destroy good quality books. My understanding is hardcovers can't be recycled into pulp.
OK, I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have a suggestion?
posted by Steve Weber at 8/21/2006
9 Comments:
I recently sold 4 items(the same item) this week where the amazon sales rank was around 2,000,000. I had it listed for about four months. Recently I started "playing around" with tags and search suggestions. I've noticed items where this is done begin to sell more. I don't know for sure if this has anything to do with the sales increase, but its worth a shot.
As for the $5.00 listings, what you could do is buy resale rights to an ebook and offer it free to customers. Even if your listing is priced higher, people love getting things free. Several of my book listings have sellers using repricers(I won't use one), instead of competing on price I offer a free business or real estate ebook (I sell business and real estate titles) in my description.
For the love of God, don't destroy the books!! You're giving me heart palpitations just thinking about it! As the original article says, there are many things you can do with them. I would try putting a few on eBay (one at a time though) and keep the rest in storage. You never know what the future will bring - the author may bring out a new bestselling book and you could suddenly find yourself with a stack of valuable books! If all else fails, give them away as gifts to book-lovers, give a few away through Bookcrossing and so on. There's always a way.
Thanks for all the input, everybody.
Dan Williams, you are absolutely right about using "tags" and "search suggestions." These are relatively new features on Amazon, and well worth exploring, especially if you have a big stake in a book.
For people unfamiliar with Amazon's "search suggestions," here's a recent Amazon corporate announcement that explains it well. By coincidence, near the bottom of the announcement, you'll see a quote from this blog.
800,000 Isn't that bad. Most of my books are ranked in the miliions, but they sell within 2 months. Try listing some on Ebay. the Phrase "Civil War" acutally draws a lot of traffice to a listing. I agreee that this author could come out with another book, or perhaps that around certains dates tis book will sell more.
Can you give us some specifics about the book like the title and ISBN number? It might help us give you some better suggestions.
A few months ago, we bought 1,000 books from a lady in our town. Most of them had come from the annual public library book sale. We sold enough to recover our costs and make a decent profit, but a fairly large percentage of the rest were crap. After we tried selling them as bulk lots on eBay, we finally ended up giving them back to the public library for their annual book sale, on the theory "What goes around, comes around."
I just signed up with Books for Soldiers and find that a lot of them ask for American History books and sometimes specifically Civil War.
So that might be a very positive way to unload some of the books and make a soldier happy or contribute to base libraries.
The requests for books are numerous. So check it out if you want.
Years ago, we had someone who came into our used book store wondering what to do with a carton of Everett Dirksen autobiographies he had. We had fun brainstorming what to do with them, things like slipping them into cars in the mall parking lot if people had left their windows sufficiently open. I think he decided to have the youth group at his church hollow them out and line them with velvet to make stash or jewelry boxes.
If you live in a part of the country which has Civil War historical re-enactors doing local encampments at historical sites, perhaps you could work a deal to have them sell your Civil War books at a price that works out well for both parties.
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