No Barriers for Entry In Small Scale Bookselling.

Secondhand Bookseller on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, France, 1821. In a way, it hasn't changed much.

Someone told me about http://www.bookwise.com/ a network marketing company for books. It was quite interesting. It looks like tupperware for books. There are two ways this would work, you would sell the books as an affiliate, or you would buy the books at a discount and resell them to customers. What is interesting about this scheme is that you are an independent contractor, a contract employee of the company. The contract looks very complicated. There is no storefront involved. I can imagine someone having book parties much like tupperware parties where they invite groups of people over to look at their small selection of books.

I can imagine a small group of ladies getting together to look at the latest Danielle Steel, or Debbie Macomber books. Maybe, they would pick up a small glossy catalog with a few of the latest titles. I wonder if the top seller would get a minivan instead of a pink cadillac like they give for their top sales people at Avon.

Another thing which is coming up is the electronic book kiosk. Apparently http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ is planning on setting up kiosks to print some titles on demand at a variety of libraries. All it requires is a PDF file which is fed into a book production setup. It produces a trade paperback style book at a cost of approximately a penny a page.

Of course, book vending machines are not new. Although, I don't have a picture of it, the Japanese have book vending machines in their subways in many places. Maxi Livres in France just started selling books in vending machines for approximately $2.45 in American dollars. They are supposed to have a wide variety of books available.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9005718/

It doesn't take that much to sell books from a vending machine. The University of Iowa has sold both zines and handmade books directly from standard vending machines, The Aramark 111-112 snack machine will do it. This is an article on it.
http://www.futureofthebook.com/stories/storyReader$356

I was looking through the google images on book vending machines. Apparently, they aren't as uncommon as I thought. I saw images of them from Scotland, Sao Paolo, Barcelona, France, and Japan. It must only be a unique phenomena here in the United States.

After digging a little more, I found an example of a company with specifications for a book vending maching in Ireland. I wonder why it has not come here to America. It would be a very nice import. I can imagine it in subways and at the airport. The company is called Novel Idea.
http://www.novel-idea-vending.com/spec.html

If you really think about it, it does not take much to sell books in the real world as well. A table at a flea market isn't that expensive, and if you sell from a table in the street, it costs very little. Vendors on Manhattan's sidewalks are the bane of the local bookstores. They just need a tax id and a vendors license which is much cheaper than rent.

The Manhattan book street vendors also have a reputation for theft. A person can ask some Manhattan street vendors for a new book in a day which if you think about it, is not possible if they are using a regular distributor like Baker and Taylor or Ingram. Please buy from your bookstore, not the street vendors. It saves the bookstore money on broken windows and keeps them in business.

After a while, if the person is good enough at selling, they move from the street to the flea markets and eventually their own store. This usually doesn't happen. Selling books on the streets in Manhattan is a great way to end up nowhere.

Although, I've heard that selling hot dogs or morning coffee and bagels in Manhattan is not a bad way to make money if you are tough enough for it.

Of course, it is even easier on the internet. There are numerous affiliate programs for selling books. You can sell using Amazon.com or Powells.com which I am doing, or any of a number of other affiliate programs.

There are also various places where you can put together a back list of books to sell. For $25.00 a month you can set up an account on ABEbooks for up to 500 books. It is very easy to sell through their site. http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Sell/ . Alibris another service costs about the same amount and also sells music and films.

There are effectively no barriers to entry to start a small book storefront on the internet. If you only have a few books, you can simply put them up on ebay or another auction site to sell.

Small Scale Online Bookselling, Romantic Science Fiction

For a while when the science fiction bookstore which I helped at closed in Manhattan, I tried small scale bookselling online. I used the various books I had collected mostly signed and unusual science fiction to make some money on ebay and abe. Things like signed paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, or signed hardcovers by Greg Bear. I would first put the items for sale on ebay, then if they didn't sell, I would put them on ABE-- Advanced Book Exchange, http://www.abebooks.com/ . I never found Alibris another booksale exchange to be very appealing. It was a very interesting experience.

I could create both a backlist and front list of titles doing this. However, I found that finding new books was not that easy, unless I chose to put an ad in the paper and take all comers, or was willing to buy entire estate sales worth of books. At the time, I was in Brooklyn, so I didn't have a car. A lot of New Yorkers don't drive.

I learned that bookselling really is very much a labor of love. There is not a huge amount of money in it, unless you sell very high quality rare books, or can sell in very large volumes like the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, or Amazon online.

For me unless the book was very valuable, at least $25 for a book, and ideally abve $50 it seemed like a tremendous effort for very little return. With used books, you have to list every book separately, they don't tend to repeat themselves, unlike new books where you can set up one listing and sell them repeatedly. It requires meticulous care and the promise of quality customer service to very picky customers.

I spent quite a bit of time learning to pack and ship the books. This is really important, surprisingly, it is one of the few things that differentiates online used booksellers is their shipping.

Bookselling online is incredibly easy to get into, almost too easy. I think it is one of the factors that drove many of the used bookstores out of business. It was no longer necessary for the pickers, the people who went out to library booksales, church sales, thrift shops and other places to get old books to bring them in to the bookstore, they could just sell them themselves. This created an incredibly competitive environment. Most of the pickers I've met are older people looking to supplement their income with a hobby.

When you can go to something like the http://www.ioba.org/ -- The Independent Online Booksellers Associations and learn all the basics for free, or http://www.bibliomania.net/ it becomes much too easy to enter the field.

Also, it increases theft from bookstores and libraries. Suddenly, there is a very easy way for people to sell material that is stolen. They can take it and put it online. Please don't buy books with library markings online or from used bookstores, the item you are buying could be stolen. Ask about the stores policy about library books. If they are honest, they will tell you "We don't sell books with library markings." This is a really important policy.

It is amazing the variety and kind of library thieves there are. One of the most common refrains we here is, "I paid my taxes for these books, I should be able to take these books home and keep them."

The concept of returning or borrowing books is unacceptable to many people. We have to keep all the windows locked where we work, or they will go out the window. People mangle the books so they can take them home. Videos and dvds are even harder to keep from being stolen. The most common sign of a book thief is a combination of razor blades and string... No library is immune from this kind of behavior. There are stories of people going around to various libraries around the country and filling whole houses full of stolen books. I've read about this multiple times. This is a nice little article on map thievery, almost as common as book thievery.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2209582,00.html

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Romance books are one of the most read type of books on the market. They account for most of the paperbacks that get printed. Something that is important to know is that mostly women read novels.

A good source for information and reviews on romance books is http://www.romantictimes.com/

One of my favorite cross genre writers is Elizabeth Lowell http://www.elizabethlowell.com/ She writes romantic suspense, historical romances, romances, mysteries, science fiction, and even has a screenplay. She is a best selling author. She wrote one of my favorite books, a science fiction romance called Name of A Shadow which was nominated for the Hugo Award.

Another science fiction writer who wrote a classic romantic science fiction book is Tanith Lee,

The Silver Metal Lover. This was followed up by Metallic Love, a story of near perfect robots who are used as entertainers and escorts who escape their designers in the end.

I am adding Romantic Times to the list of places for book reviews.

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I added a bestselling book widget and a comic book widget from widget bucks. I have also been posting on bumpzee.com and fuelmyblog.com to generate some more interest. The bumpzee widget is very large and cumbersome, I think. If they had something smaller, I might add it to my site.

It is rather interesting who is searching for and looking at my web site. There were two sites which I found rather interesting. One was Plaxo, an online address book site, and another was Zuula, a new metasearch engine.

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I looked through the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2007 and chose two of them to put on hold. The first is Ha Jin A Free Life, the second is Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read -- a truly wonderful title. I do not read every book I reserve. I usually examine the first two chapters, the cover, and the blurb to see if I want to read the book. Not everything is worth reading.