Q&A: Do you worry about competing online booksellers?

QUESTION: I'm a big fan of your site and check your posts often. But I wonder if you worry about people buying your book and then competing against you? Do you feel you're gambling with your own livelihood by putting a book out there telling all your secrets that your neighbor could stumble upon?

ANSWER: Good question, but I don't really worry about getting too much competition for several reasons:

-- The more participation in a market, the more useful the market becomes, and the buyers you'll have. I believe there's a network effect with online bookselling. That is, the more sellers there are, the more often buyers can find something they want. So more buyers show up. Further, online booksellers probably buy more books online than any other group of people. I know that I buy at least four times as many books every year, most online, than I did before I became a seller. I think this is one of the reasons Amazon probably likes its third-party selling program. The sellers are probably the most active buyers, both used merchandise and new merchandise. There is no doubt, we Pro-Merchants are Amazon's most valuable and profitable customers.

-- Bookselling is really hard work, and used bookselling is the hardest of all. So only a limited number of people are really going to do it. I don't think very many people are going to buy my book unless they're already selling, or seriously considering it. There's no secrets in my book, it's stuff anyone is going to know if they sell long enough. The main point of my book is simply concentrating on customer service, as a way to compete.

-- You're right, there is a finite number of used books available for us booksellers to find. So if lots more people started selling, it would be harder for me and other people to find inventory. But it's always been impossible to sell a book nobody wants. It all boils down to knowing books, so you can pick the right ones. The key is finding scarce and out-of-print books, that's always been the way to make money in this business, and it always will be. Specializing in one area -- whether it's cookbooks, children's books, modern first, whatever -- helps you compete by teaching you to recognize what's unusual and valuable.