I’m excited to officially announce the *almost* availability of the revised edition of my eBook, Used Books: Big Business – The Secrets to Selling Books Online for Big Profits.  It is currently in the editing phase but I hope to have it available in a few weeks after the holidays.  I’m so excited for this new edition because I’ve added so many new things to it.  New chapters include book scouting, third party services such as Aman Pro, Fillz, The Art of Books, etc along with a chapter on customer service and a ton of other great info.  In this edition I’ve also included screen shots and pictures to give the reader a more thorough understanding of the concepts in the book.  Current eBook customers will get a significant discount and I promise the price will be very reasonable to new buyers.

Here are a few tid bits of what to expect:

Also, I’m excited to announce the *almost* availability of my first Amazon sales/fees spreadsheet.  I have worked many hours on this spreadsheet to give the Amazon bookseller the most easy to use and yet thorough view of their entire Amazon bookselling operation.  In this spreadsheet you can keep track of sales, fees, book costs, all Fulfillment by Amazon fees including inbound shipments as well profit percentages and a whole lot more!  This spreadsheet is truly the only thing you’ll need to see how much money you’re making, how much you’re paying Amazon and overall how well your Amazon sales are doing.

Here are a few quick peeks at the spreadsheet:

As you can tell, I’m VERY excited about this new addition to the few products I have available.  These will most likely be offered in a package deal and also on an individual basis for you.  I know that this post sounded very salesy but I simply couldn’t contain my excitement and wanted to share these new products to my readers.  Stay tuned for the official announcement when it is available.  If you haven’t signed up for my email list yet now’s a good time.  I will be emailing the group as soon as this is available so get it while the gettins’ good!  Sign up for the email list along the left under the Newsletter heading.

If you have read my previous post on Fulfillment by Amazon, you’ll know that I just started using it last week and originally didn’t have much time to really see how it’s working.  I’ve officially been using it for about 2 weeks now and wanted to give everyone a followup post to let you know how it’s going so far.  If you missed the last post, check out the post titled Fulfillment by Amazon: A First Timers Review.

Here are my stats as of 11/6/09:

TOTAL PROFIT: $57.16

Here’s the breakdown:

Total Revenue: $293.72

Books sent to Amazon: 281

Books sold: 69

Total Commission: $44.06

Per Unit Fulfillment Fees: $31

Per Unit Weight-Based Fees: $12.92

Charges to ship to Amazon: $64.88

Variable Closing Fees: $83.70

So far, the stats really aren’t looking that good considering I’ve paid $236.56 in fees/charges and have only made $57.16.  However, you have to bare in mind that I’ve sent 281 books and have only sold 69 so far.  I still have 212 books in Amazon’s warehouse that are fulfillable.  A big fee as you can see is the charges to get the books to ship to Amazon.  If I just leave the books up there then I will never incur those charges again.  I’ve calculated it out that it costs about 29 cents/lb to send books to Amazon with their dirt cheap rates you get from UPS.

Also, the great majority of these books are penny books that I’ve been discarding for over a year now because I didn’t think I had any way to compete or to make any money at all from these books.  I’m making about $1.30 or so selling books for $4 that everyone else is selling for a penny.

Overall, Fulfillment by Amazon wasn’t as great as what I had originally anticipated but I’m still very happy because I’m able to sell penny books and actually make a profit, don’t have to fulfill any orders at all and save room in my warehouse.  It’s still an ongoing process and I intend to keep my spreadsheet going to continually monitor if using Fulfillment by Amazon is still worth the effort.

Have you heard of Fulfillment by Amazon?  Do you even know what Fulfillment by Amazon is?  If you’ve just started this crazy business of selling books on the Internet, it may be new to you.  For all you old timers, you may have heard of Fulfillment by Amazon and know how it works but may have been skeptical to try it.  I’m here to explain a little about what this service is and to share my experience with everyone on the process it takes to get started.

Fulfillment by Amazon, in it’s simplest terms, is a service that Amazon offers that allows you to send books or many other different kinds of inventory directly to Amazon so that they will fulfill your orders for you.  You send your books to Amazon, they store the books in their warehouse for you until they sell and when they do, Amazon ships them directly to the customer for you.  They also handle any customer service issues with the book if the customer is dissatisfied in any way.   The only thing you need to do is go through the FBA process that they setup to get them ready for processing by the Amazon warehouse and shipping them off.

Why I started to use Fulfillment by Amazon

The reason I chose to start this service is because of the website Book to the Future.  You’ll notice that Nathan, the owner of the site is also a sponsor of the blog and for that, I’m grateful.  It is from my conversations with him and from my perusing of his website and reading his eBook on Fulfillment by Amazon that I finally got motivated enough to try.  The eBook is a little light on content but it’s what really got me inspired to give it a try and see what I could do.  I always found it exciting to think that I didn’t have to send any orders out if a book sold.  That could free me up to do more important things such as finding new inventory and streamlining my business.

However, I did not just sign up and start learning Fulfillment by Amazon on a whim.  I had a problem with one piece of my business and knew there was a better way to approach it.  The problem was that I would end up with tens of thousands of books in my garage that were already processed and deemed to be not salable online.  Most of these books were still in great condition but were what you’d call “penny books”, which to me meant any book with a value under $3 per Amazon.  If I would list and sell these books, I either make a few cents or even be negative due to the cost of postage, shipping supplies, commission, etc.   Books that looked brand new and had a very low Amazon sales rank were just being tossed in with the old encyclopedias, musty novels, magazines and whatever other junk that tends to accumulate after processing.  I was doing this ever since I started and knew there had to be a way to make some money on these books.

I learned from Nathan’s eBook on Fulfillment by Amazon that he was selling these penny books by using Fulfillment by Amazon and actually making a few bucks by directly competing with the big boys AND could charge much higher and still maintain a top position to get maximum exposure.  This was very exciting!  I could now make some cash on the books I’d since been simply discarding and not even fulfill the orders when they came in!

Benefits to using Fulfillment by Amazon

There are many benefits to selling any kind of book on Amazon; not only penny books.  Here are a few reasons why I chose it and am currently very happy with it so far.

• Your orders qualify for Amazon Prime
  • Amazon customers can sign up for a program that can get them unlimited FREE 2-day shipping and 1-day shipping for only $3.99.
• Your orders qualify for Super Saver Shipping
  • Any Amazon customer gets free shipping if a purchase of over $25 is made.
• Your listing can get the top spot in the listing
  • This is my favorite part.  With Amazon FBA, you can charge up to $4 for a book and sit atop all of those hundreds of 1 cent listings!  The reason for this is because Amazon ranks the listings by price plus shipping, which if not using Fulfillment by Amazon, the lowest price you can go is 1 cent plus $3.99 shipping.  With Amazon FBA, since customers qualify for free shipping, your listing is put at the top because there is no shipping fee.  This means that I now have many books that were previously unsalable for me because I couldn’t compete to now being able to compete PLUS make even more money than what a penny book seller can make!
• You don’t have to do anything if your book sells
  • Another great benefit because once you ship the books to Amazon’s warehouse, you’re done.  Amazon takes care of the rest.

First impressions of the Fulfillment by Amazon program

My first impressions of the program are stellar.  I’ve read other accounts of people having a terrible time with it at first when they first started out, but it looks to be smooth sailing so far.  I’ll be sure to keep you up to date if that changes though.

The process is pretty straightforward for me.  Sort the books by condition, scan all the books to get the 10 digit ISBN, input the ISBNs into Amazon Book Loader spreadsheet, condition, SKU, etc and upload to Amazon.  I will then go into my inventory, convert them to “Fulfilled by Amazon”, place stickers on the books so that Amazon can inventory them, pack them up and drop them off at UPS.  If I get some time, I might make a short tutorial in more detail.

After only about 3 days, Amazon will notify me the inventory has arrived at their warehouse and shortly after, it’s up on their site.  So far, I’ve had about 100 books listed for less than a week and have already sold 25 books.  The best part is that these books, in the past, have been shooed out into the garage to be donated!

I haven’t had that much time to do a full evaluation of the program yet but so far, it’s been going great and am very excited to keep sending more inventory their way!