Bookaholic

I’ve spent perhaps thirty years focusing on the college market for publishing (after a career as partner in a poetry press. Rationally, I chose it as an easy market (to which I had sold a title by accident), with texts required in humanities classes, year after year.

But, just in the past few days, I’ve experienced the resurgence of a guilty feeling dating from my two years in the Peace Corps as a teacher. I hadn’t been trained as a teacher specifically, but I was eager to “help save the world” in whatever way I was needed.

The system, carried over from the British style of education, decreed that at the end of Standard Eight, students across the nation would take an exam, and only one-quarter of them would pass and go on for further education. Maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough, or understand the great pressure this put on abandoning regular classes so as to “game the system” by studying previous year exams, cramming, improving test-taking skills. Our performance was below average when the expectation had been that our presence would have increased the school’s chances. As I recall, seven of the 45 students passed. And perhaps the greatest injustice was that the head monitor, who had been head monitor even when he was in the Seventh Standard, did not pass. I was not invited to stay for the final quarter of schooling, though my roommate did stay.

I now believe that my intense focus on the transition from high school to college, which was also personally difficult for me, was compounded by my failure as a teacher. What would I teach myself, or students like myself, in order to succeed in education? What should I have known, or done, in Tanzania to help shape the lives of the students in my classes?

I’ve been content to step back from the classroom, and instead help supply the teachers with materials for that paradigm. Teach the teachers, teach myself. Does that work better? I can’t say. It does begin to explain to myself why I do these things, repetitively, over and over again. Perhaps that is my neurosis, or rut. Perhaps it is the meaning of my life.

This is just a fun thing.
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With a thousand (yipes) titles online, I look around for ways to be more effective. Did the survey of other sites where books are sold, dug a little more into it, and then I started to see a pattern.

Looking from the “other side of the mirror,” as the buyer sees it, my list is not really as scattered as it seems to me. But it does fall into, or I can characterize it as, three age groups (all of which I feel, depending on my mood in the morning). One is college and soon after, interested in everything actual, starting with college textbooks (a market by itself. The next group, getting into the thirties and forties, people are building families, parenting, getting concerned about health and diet, self-improvement, sports, getting ahead in business, and such. After that, older folks settle in for more philosophy, history, collecting, politics, the investing side of business.

How do the sites stack up? Plugging in a few keywords or names, I created a very subjective list to suit my list. I rejected some (for the time being) for having TOO MANY of the kinds of titles I want to sell, and others for having TOO FEW to be considered; and some were TOO NEW to tell what their audience would be like.

So, on a trial basis, I will add two new ones for each age grouping: Craigslist and ePier for the younger set; Buyitsellit and Atomic Mall for the middle group; and Alsoshop and Biblio (with ePier thrown in) for the older set.

Is this an accurate analysis? Who knows, but it’s a starting place.

By now, I’ve noticed another matter; I’m not really happy with some of my early acquisitions, particularly romance and mystery novels. I had picked some favorites, but they haven’t moved. And there are outdated or small items I’d like to shed. One site that I know of, Bonanzle, offers “freebies” — in my case, buy anything and get another book for free. I’m weeding out paperbacks and anything that’s set at $5 or less — is it really worth my time plus the shipping cost to sell a $5 book?

I just went through my basic list and came up with about 150 titles to mark as freebies on Bonanzle. It would also help my home situation, as the books are climbing up the walls, not enough bookshelves (though a side effect has been to actually go through my other junk and move it — paint cans, electronics, and all the cardboard and shipping supplies. So many tapes — does anyone listen to tapes anymore? And what about all those reels of tape from my days when I had a radio program, and produced a serial, or worked with two others in experimental radio “humor.” I don’t even own a tape deck that can handle reels anymore. Choice: trash them and never look back, or spend time converting to mp3s? Hmm. I’ll sleep on that one. Might be able to sell the 28-part serial, or at least put it online. So, I was doing podcasts before the iPod.

Haven’t sold ANY books this week. What can I do to change that? Lower prices? I see that plenty of people stop by to take a look. Reduce the shipping to media mail; did that tonight, that will cut the costs.

And with my new snobbishness about purchasing, I’m running out of good sources. I’ve pilfered the thrift shops. Ah, but tomorrow morning is Garage Saling! Last week was a bust, but there’s always that next one, just a little further away that maybe has great stuff – that I can afford.

And then there’s my publishing. I have eleven titles I could be making into ebooks. Just want to get it right. Hardly making any progress in the fat PHP book I bought, but I need that for a good working website. Also XML, but I think that’s not such a big step from XHTML.

So, I’ve been on four sites (plus my own), and I thought it was time to start evaluating my experience. After several months of no sales, in the past 3 months, I’ve sold 24 books, well, 23 used books and 8 of my own publication. Today’s email has an invoice for last month’s sales: $1.22 is my cost (plus my time and shipping — oh, for the days when I had a shipper to do all that for me).

One site sold 11, a second sold 9, 2 for the third and 1 (plus a freebie) for the fourth site. Lopsided, I’d say. Of course, the top-selling site is the one I started with, toward the first of the year, and toward which I maintain my own “catalog” page with links to each title, hoping that the Google spiderbots actually read a whole long page (doubtful).

So yesterday and today I sat down to do some more research, make a simple table of 29 sites, to see which sites are selling, how they charge, and whether some or any fit my needs for selling books. My goal is modest: a small but steady income that would supplement my meager Social Security monthly (the result of a lifelong career of freelancing and sole proprietorship).

So at the top of my list, as I sort them, are the sites that cost the least, preferably with no recurring monthly costs. Not surprisingly, the top two are my own website (www.bandannabooks.com/auction) and Craigslist (which I hadn’t really considered before, but will now). Also with no recurring cost is Blujay, my newest site, but one with fewer sales, and an irritating quirk of flashing ERROR without informing me of what the error was, so I have to go back and fill in all the blanks again. I had been thinking of dropping them in favor of better sites; however, the results of my survey may make me reconsider. And a newcomer, j4ua.com, which offers one option with no fees for less than 100 titles.

Since this exercise is capitalism in action, every site has its own way of distinguishing itself as “the alternative to eBay” (which I didn’t even include in this survey because of the fees, fees, fees).

I set up hypothetical markers, as if I were to sell $100 a month, $200, or $300. If I get to that august level, I will have to do a new chart based on more ambitious goals.

The costs on most sites are listing fee, monthly fee, and final sale fee. As a rough rule of thumb, based on my own sales, selling 24 books out of a list now topping 1,000 (whew), and average price somewhere around $15 to $20 per sale, I’m figuring first that it would take selling 6 books to reach $100, and I would need to list about 40 books to sell one, so that comes to, let’s say, 250 books to reach $100. That many titles won’t affect the monthly fee, or the commission percentage, but if there is any cost to list books, that’ll make a big difference.

A number of sites make a point of having no listing fees; so, how do they make their money? One of them relies on ads, but most nail their profit to the final sale commission, which puts them on your side — if you do well, they do well.

Seven sites make the next cut, $11 per month and under even at the $300 level. These are USiFF (Usellitforfree), eBid (even though I usually add the gallery fee of 2%), alsoshop.com, OnlineAuction, SpecialistAuctions, and BISI (buyitsellit). eBid was my first, and they still offer a Seller+ option to list everything free for $49 for life (which I accepted). Alsoshop.com for under 100 titles is free with a final commission of 2.5%, the next step up is a modest $2.50/month for up to 500 titles. And BISI has no monthly fee for less than 10 titles, after that it’s $9.95/month; also, it appears to me that BISI is not a mall but offers to set you up with your own website. I’m leery of that from the point of view of traffic. Who would know about my books if I’m just on a website? Perhaps I misunderstand their offer. And the last in this group, j4ua again, with another plan, a basic store for $11.

The next three come in under $20/month: ePier, Atomic Mall, and Mailcar.net. Mailcar seems to be another webstore offer, not a mall arrangement, which does not appeal to me. ePier also offers a “premium” bundle for 10 bucks.

We start to get into some heavy hitters in the $20-$33 range (over 3 months): CQout, Bonanzle, Auxoo (formerly PlunderHere), and Biblio.com. CQout has a limitation on 85kb for images, which is waaay too small for my graphics; still, their commission of 4.5% and storefront for $12/month seems plausibly within my budget. Bonanzle is a lot of fun (that’s one of mine), with the chance to offer a Bonanza once a month, or create a hotlist (only one of your own), so they’re intent on building community as well as selling books. They also offer the chance to put in freebies (buy anything and get a freebie) and other creative ways. (Speaking of creative, I didn’t even include Wigix in the survey, it’s sui generis but worth looking into). Auxoo has a similar commission, I’m confused about their offer, it looks like you can sell without a store for commission fees (set up in a table), or have a monthly fee for different levels of stores with a flat 5.95% commission. Biblio.com has a plan at 7.5% commission, with a monthly fee of $10 or more, depending on the number of titles.

I lump most of the rest into “too steep for me,” from $45 to $100 (over 3 months): Half.com, Biblio’s other plan at 15% commission (the same level as 4 other sites’ rates), ABEbooks, Alibris basic and Alibris gold, Easybidzlive.com, Amazon (individual plan). All but Easybidzlive have around 100 million titles listed, all in one room (kidding).

And, finally, way out of my league: Ruby Lane (jewelry and such), Coast2CoastAuctions (25 cents per listing!), and Amazon Pro Merchant. Also eBay itself.

Now, in terms of popularity, check out the PSU site (http://www.powersellersunite.com/auctionsitewatch.php), which does a daily recount of listings on the most popular sites (some of which I did not even look at). My four sites are 2, 3, 4, and 6 (skipping CQout not because it’s British, but for a few features I found problematic, including payment methods — I haven’t researched that yet, and may change my mind).

Gasp, did I do all that? Did I learn something? Lots of places I probably won’t be using, and a few I hadn’t considered previously.