Listing books with ISBNs on Amazon is one of the simplest sites you can find to list your books on.  Simply search for the ISBN and it will then automatically come back with the title/author/publisher/copyright date and you’ve found the listing to place your copy under.  However, if it’s a book that too old for an ISBN (pre-1970) then it’s a little more challenging.  In this post, I’m going to show you how to find the Amazon listing to sell your copy under.

The first order of business is to take yourself over to the Amazon’s advanced search page and fill out all the appropriate information.  Always put in the last name of the author, title, publisher, binding and date.  If you match all of those, you’re golden.  If nothing comes back, you’re going to have to create a Product Detail Page (if you’re a Pro-Merchant).  If you’re not a Pro-Merchant maybe you can ask one politely to create you a page.

Amazon Advanced Search Page

Once you put in all of the required information, you’ll then come to the search results page where, depending on the book, there will probably be more than 1 listing that matches all of your criteria.  Amazon HATES this because it makes them eBay-like.  They even have crawlers going over their site 24/7 to consolidate these listings but I’m straying from the point here.  You’ll see a search results page like this.

Amazon Listings

Notice my arrows?  These are here for a reason.  Once you’re at this screen you’re then going to need to pay attention to 2 things.

1. Amount of copies under each listing – You are going to see all kinds of listings.  You’ll see listings with 1 person fishing for a price (notice the $40 price tag on the 4th one down?), all listings in between and finally the sweet spot.  This is where you want to place your copy.  Do you think that the listing with one guy is the actual market price?  Highly doubtful.  That totally defeats the whole “market” idea, right?  You need more than 1 person to make a “market”.  We need some competition!  Search through the pages until you find the listing with the MOST people under it.  This is the true market value of the book as competition is present.  The price under this listing is 9 times out of 10 what that book is selling for on other sites as well.
2. Sales rank of that listing – Now that you have the listing, what if you have a few that are close such as the example above.  You have one listing that has 5 copies, one that has 4 copies and one that has 3 copies.  That’s not a whole lot of difference, right?  You’ll have some fudge room when you run into low numbers like this.  Click into each of these listings that you’ve whittled it down to and see which one has the lowest sales rank.  This one, more than likely, is the listing that gets the best exposure in the search results when buyers are looking for it.

Amazon Sales Rank

Once you’ve spotted your golden egg of a listing a number of “it depends” situations comes up.  Are you a very small seller that just has a few dozen books?  Click the “Sell Yours Here” button on that detail page and Amazon steps you through the process.

Amazon Sell Yours Here

Are you using a third party service such as FillZ, Art of Books or your service de jour?  You need the ASIN to punch in so that it knows which listing to match your book up to.  Copy the ASIN from your listing and put it into your input screen.

FillZ Inventory Input

Run through your normal process of listing and you’re done!  The book should be live.

I hope for your sake that you always get books with ISBN numbers but if you’re a rare book dealer, person that just likes to sell older books or someone that simply can’t find any newer books at a good price this is the post you’re going to want to bookmark.

For anyone currently listing books without ISBNs, how do you do it?  I’m sure people have their different ways.

Amazon’s sales rank is a crucial component in determining the demand for a particular book.  The Amazon sales rank provides a snapshot of current sales of a particular book selling on Amazon.com and seems to have become the de facto standard at least in the online book-selling world.  I’m most familiar with using the Amazon sales rank from book scouting as I’m sure some of you are also.  Book scouts use the Amazon sales rank for buying decisions at the moment in time they’re at a sale to determine if it would be worth it to the to purchase this book for resale or not.  This typically gives them a leg up to do a rudimentary prediction on how quickly a book will sell but did you know you can also use it as a trending metric for better buying decisions?

Think of an example such as this.  You’re at a book sale scouting for some books and come across a book that is being sold for a buck.  You scan it with your trusty bar code scanner and notice that it’s currently selling on Amazon for $50 with a sales rank of 100,000.  You would be pretty excited, right?  I probably would too, but how do you truly know that the sales rank is actually steady at that time?  Is there a chance that this book was in very high demand because of some event or fad and is now slowly dying off in demand?  Of course!

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What is the Amazon Sales Rank and How It Can Benefit You

Amazon Sales Rank

The Amazon Sales Rank is one of the most valuable tools that you will find in the online book selling world.  The Amazon Sales Rank helps you make better buying decisions for new inventory, it tells you approximately how fast a book is likely to sell and gives you an idea on how many more copies are selling than any other book in Amazon’s catalog for comparison purposes.

Some online book sellers focus heavily on this number yet others don’t spend as much time with it.  Everyone has their strategy, but I, personally, focus heavily on the Amazon Sales Rank.

The Amazon Sales Rank is a number that Amazon assigns to all books in it’s huge catalog of millions.  It is a number set to give you an understanding of the volume of sales a particular book is getting.

Amazon has being tight lipped about exactly how this number is calculated but there is a basic understanding that the higher the number, the more recently the book has sold.  The number is NOT about how often it is expected to sell or how many copies it is selling.  It is simply an indicator of the last time a copy has sold.

In my opinion, the Amazon Sales Rank only gives you the answer to 1 question.

• When was the last copy of this book sold?

There is no other voodoo about it.  It’s also a good indicator of future sales, but that is not it’s explicit purpose.  There have been a few studies that try to understand it such as this study on understanding Amazon’s Sales Rank.  Also, as you can see from the comments on this blog post about how Amazon’s Sales Rank is hotly contested because no one really understands it fully besides Amazon itself.

Don’t forget about the recent Amazon Sales Rank fiasco.  People were in an uproar about gay and lesbian books myseteriously losing their sales ranks.

It helps many people including online booksellers, authors, publishers and the like but to give it some perspective to us, online booksellers, take away these points.

• Don’t necessarily think that a book’s sales rank will automatically classify it as a quick seller or not
• If you come across a book that has no sales rank at all, this means it has never sold on Amazon before.  However, do not let that sway you from buying it if you get a great deal.  That customer just might come along and be looking for it.
• Don’t use the Amazon Sales Rank as your sole indicator of which books to put in your inventory.  Factor in the lowest 3 used prices as well as the sales rank to make an accurate balance between the time you expect the book to sit on the shelf, your overall storage space and the amount you are paying for it.
• No matter how much research people do, no one will ever know for sure how this number works.  Do some testing of your own.  Pay close attention to a particular book’s sales rank when you buy it, monitor other sellers’ listings on that book to see if you can estimate other sales of the same book and finally notice it when your copy sells.
• Use TitleZ.com to track the trending sales rank of a book.  As I mentioned in my previous post, TitleZ will give you a timeline of what a books general popularity is to give you an idea of future sales.

If you previously haven’t paid attention to Amazon’s Sales Rank in the past, now is your chance to.  It is yet another powerful tool in your knowledge arsenal to make more money selling books online!