Bookaholic

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 And there are outdated or small items I’d like to shed.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.