We interrupt this regularly scheduled beginner series post for this special announcement of a prime example of a misinformed and quick to judge customer on Amazon.

I apologize for interrupting the flow of the upcoming series of beginner posts, but I just received an email from a customer and thought that this would be a prime example for anyone new to bookselling or booksellers that have never received a customer email like this.  I hope this post will give you a little taste of what could happen with a customer service issue and give you some ammo to fire back if this does happen.

Let me explain the situation and then I’ll let you know how I approached it.

Yesterday, an order came in on Amazon very soon after I had listed it for a large law book that was accurately listed at 2:55PM.  It was for $17 and I had made about a nickel for it so I was pretty happy.  This happens all the time anymore so I didn’t consider it any big deal.  I noticed it yesterday because I will occasionally go in and just take a peek at my orders even if I’m not processing them at the moment.

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I occasionally dive into different topics and knowledge levels on this blog.  I’ve discussed first-timer topics as well as getting started book scouting to more intermediate topics such as Fulfillment by Amazon.  I recently had a request to start from the beginning on just what it takes to get started selling books on the Internet.  I thought this was a great idea because I’ve never really taken a step back and wrote out everything that it took me to really get a strong position selling books online.  There are probably dozens of different ways that you can get started in this business but I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and discuss in a series of upcoming posts about what it took for me to get from thinking that I might be able to make some money selling my used books to where I am today with a part time employee, an inventory of 5,000+ books and growing and being able to let my wife stay at home with our daughter.

Online bookselling will not make you rich neither will it give you fame, but what it will do is establish a part time (or full time) business that will give you just about as much back as you put into it.  There are many strategies that you can employ and processes that you can hone to really take advantage of the business and to make maximum profits and that’s why I love it.  Being able to take what the general public thinks is something that has no value, turn it around and makes thousands of dollars a month is priceless to me.

This first post in the series will concentrate on the very first few steps that you need to take to get started and establish your online bookselling business.  I will briefly go into a few topics that I believe are the most important when just starting out and try to alleviate some of the pain that I went through whenever I was first starting.

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As an online bookseller, my ultimate goal is to make money and pricing books is a critical part of that. It’s not to indulge in learning all there is to know about books nor is it out of sheer bliss that I sell books online. If I didn’t get paid to sell books, you would never see me driving 4 hours to then load up 20,000 books, drive back 4 hours and then proceed to unload them all for 6+ hours (true story) thus never having to learn pricing books. Knowing that my end goal is to make as much money as possible selling books, one of the most important things you need to know is how to accurately learn the art of pricing books when you are listing. Knowing how to learn the art of pricing books will be a critical factor in your success in online bookselling.

I’m going to look at 2 different strategies you can use in pricing books to accurately set a price you want to sell online. In this post, I’m going to just concentrate on Amazon. All other marketplaces are similar but since Amazon is the most prevalent and is the one that I’m most familiar with much of the discussion is going to be based around Amazon. These 2 strategies all have their place and it is up to you to decide which one you want to employ or to even employ a combination of them. Each strategy is a valid way to sell books on Amazon. They will all make you money but the big difference is time vs. money.

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I recently decided to take my iPhone and do a little walk through of my “warehouse”.  In the video, I show you an example of what I talk about in my eBook Used Books:Big Business about how you can start an online book selling business on a shoe string.  After you see my operation, you’ll see that I practice what I preach.  Nothing in my warehouse is fancy or worth over $20 except maybe my computer and printers.  I started out with a few dozen books and am eventually up to where you see it now.  All of the shelves were free or were thrown in with a book purchase, all desks and chairs were free along with the actual warehouse!  I know that some may not be able to get some of this stuff for free but I was fortunate enough to have a father that is a pack rat.

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I’m going to try something a little bit different this post and introduce a guest poster. He prefers to remain anonymous as his tips and tricks are what you could call insider secrets. He has some very good insights and also makes more than me every month! I am introducing him as Anonymous Book Rezolutionz. Please let me know in the comments if you like his writing and we’ll see if we can get him to post more often! I hope you enjoy it!

- Adam

I recently came across some very valuable old/vintage children’s books. They are pre ISBN, but I wanted to share them with you guys so you could get a feel for one category of books that are always worth checking out…. Old/Rare Children’s Books

So 1st off: I came across someones whole collection of old Rageddy Ann Books..They were obviously older, as I could tell right away from their construction. Sure enough, as I looked through the copyright pages, I realized that most were mid 1900′s and some were much earlier 1929 or so. I rounded all of them up as quick as possible.

I managed to get the whole lot of about 20 or so of them for usual prices of .25 -.50 each! Remember, that asking for a price on a group of books as opposed to individual prices, will always net you a much better deal. Back to the details…

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