It’s time for yet another one of my monthly sales reports!  If this is the first report you’re seeing, I release my actual sales numbers every month to let you know what I “eat my own dogfood” which means I practice what I preach in regards to online bookselling, give you an idea on the amount of money you can make and also, at the same time, give me a public goal to shoot for the next month so that you guys can hold me accountable.

Without further ado, here are September’s sales numbers and my impressions:

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First off, I want to say how excited I am about this month.  This is yet another record month for me, but it didn’t come without it’s hardships and extreme amount of work.  Here’s what it looked like this month.

Here are 3 few observations that I made:

1. I sold a lot of books, but not necessarily at a high price.

There are 2 ways to make money selling books online.  You can sell a lot of books for next to nothing *cough* penny book sellers *cough* or you can sell a few books for a lot more.  I sold a whopping 564 items this month.  The month’s average book sale was a little over $9/book.  Compare that to May’s average book value at over $16/book.  Even though I made $500 more this month I sure worked a lot harder!  If you simply don’t have the time to fulfill orders, think twice before you list that book for $1.50.  Would you be better off just donating it?

2. I spent a considerable amount of time away from home.

With this many orders and the amount of books I had to go through in order to find these books I spent a considerable amount of time at my little warehouse.  The time incurred doing this was processing that big load of 25,000+ books that I purchased earlier.  I choose to buy in huge bulk and go through them instead of going to the sales with my scanner in hand and picking and choosing.  However, could I have actually spent a day or so at this sale and came out with the same amount of books that I had to go through thousands to find?  I don’t know.  Decide if you want to know what you buy beforehand or buy in bulk and price later.

3. I decided to recruit help.

Having a full time job just squeezes my time even more. I typically only have time during the evenings to fulfill orders and answer customer service issues.  The only time I can price and list books is on the weekends.  I’m sure I could have eventually got everything done but not in this sort of time frame.   I decided to employ my cousin to help me.   It is a perfect gig for her because her kids and husband are off the school during the day and she loves books.  She’ll also work for pretty cheap so that I can actually afford her!  My mother was also able to help as well some so if you can get family to either help for free or for cheap, recruit them!

I hope that my monthly sales reports help you in seeing what kind of money that you can make in this business.  I’ve said it before, you can make as much money as you want by selling books on the Internet but you just have to put the work in to do it.  That’s why I love doing this so much.  I write my own paycheck every month!  I also hope that you can take away some ideas from the monthly lessons I learn and adapt them to your business.

It’s that time of the month again for me to lay it all out for you and show my gross sales.  This month was a pretty disappointing month for me and I completely blame it on myself.  I simply didn’t have the inventory numbers to support high numbers.

This month I had the lowest number of books in my inventory that I’ve had in a long time because I culled over 1,500 books that were no longer worthwhile to me.  These books were priced below $2.  I have determined that if I sell any book below $2, it’s not worth my time and I will typically make less than a buck.  I wanted to concentrate my time on higher end books.

I expect next month’s sales to be much better because of the huge lot of 20,000 books I got a few weekends ago.  Unfortunately, due to my full time job as an IT consultant I haven’t even processed half of them yet and am looking to get a ton more this weekend.  There is no rest for the weary!  I’ve already found about 400 that I’ve listed and have sold about $300 so far so things are going well.

For every monthly sales post I make I always want something to learn from it when the month has been a great month or a less that desirable month.  This month has been a pretty low volume for me so it’s disappointing but I know exactly why it has been low as I said with a low inventory.  Always study your monthly sales volume.  Why did you make more or less this month than last?  If you don’t know the reason you’ll have no way to pull yourself out of the rut or to mimic the great sales month you had.

Watch out for next month!  I promise that it will be well over this measly $3685!

Unfortunately, I did not repeat last month’s numbers by a long shot.  I think last month’s record numbers was because I was able to acquire a large quantity of a high selling electrical book at a deep discount.  It was going like crazy.  This month seems to be back to normal.  This is even after I culled over 1,300 books from my inventory!   It just goes to show you that it’s not how many books you have in your inventory, it’s the quality!

As promised, I will continue to post my monthly sales volume.  This month was my best month ever!  It seems the more time I put into learning about what sells and what doesn’t, acquiring more sources of inventory along with a lot of time making trips to my small warehouse fulfilling orders on a consistent basis and “getting into the groove” my sales continue to rise.  I think I am beginning to get into a bigger sense of thinking.  At first all I thought about was money and making as much as possible.  I’m now thinking in terms of the bigger picture.  Is this a viable full time business?  How do I setup regular inventory acquisition?  Making money is great and that is the goal but you can’t concentrate on those one off sales to where you may make $100 on a book.  When I first started, I was ecstatic!  I made $100 on a book that I bought for a nickel!  Now, I’m still happy about that but I’m always looking to the future and asking myself, “Now how do I replicate that?”, “What did I do right that made this sale that I can do over and over again?”

Anyway, enough of my thoughts.  Here are my sales for May.  I realize I’m a day or two early but it’s a convenient time for me and you get the gist of what I’m trying to portray.

May 2009 Book Sales