This is a guest post by reader, Frank Giovinazzi.  Frank is a published author and is definitely a go-getter when it comes to his online book business.  If you’d like more information about Frank please visit his Amazon author page.

One of the greatest benefits of self-employment – not having to answer to anyone but yourself – can also be one of its deadliest drawbacks.

I’m writing about the limits you set on yourself, what you are capable of, and the goals you either fail to set or achieve because you think you can’t do it.

As far as your book business is concerned, how many “can’ts” have you racked up over time to ensure your business is producing the same meager results month after month?  Are you racking your brain trying to figure out why you can’t break 3, 5 or $10,000/month in sales but are silently sabotaging daily?  A good reason may be because no one else is calling attention to these self-imposed limits.  They fade into the background and become unquestioned governors on your behavior.

Think of it this way – have you ever seen a confused football player zig and zag in circles when the path to the end zone was wide open? Also, who hasn’t yelled at the screen when they see the poor fellow squandering a golden opportunity?

Back to the book business; What are four or five of the biggest, absolute “can’ts” that you have placed in your own way? The ones that have come up for me recently include:

• I can’t afford the $1,500 to upgrade to Monsoon.
• I can’t process more than 2,000 books per month.
• I can’t get a $10,000 line of credit for inventory.
• I can’t create the partnerships necessary to establish a steady stream of inventory.

I’ve found that I am preventing myself from making the full effort to achieve these goals whether or not these specific goals are correct for me at the moment which leads me to an observation. It’s pretty common wisdom that small businesses are a reflection of their founder’s personality. You can look at the person and predict what kind of business they run just as easily as you can look at the business and describe the person who runs it.

As far as our topic here, consider this corollary:

The only obstacles to success in your small business are the ones you create.

You can whine all day long about government regulations, the economy, competition, forces real and imagined lined up against you, but scratch a little deeper and you will find at the core of your failure is your invisible list of “can’ts” that you have created yourself.

Because you only answer to yourself, you’re going to have to do is start asking some harder questions if you want to break through your own limits and really create the success you vaguely describe in conversation.

Start with the most reliable technology for the task – a clean sheet of paper and a pen. At the top of the sheet, write something like, “What are the things I think I can’t do in my book business?” Try to make a list of at least ten items, and just consider them. Are they accurate? Some of them might be, while most are going to be excuses, or at least areas where another solution or workaround is possible. And because running a small business, at least profitably, is about overcoming your own limitations, the next step is to create another list, with a title such as, “How can I do the things necessary to make my book business a success?”

In other words, you have to recant your entire list of “can’ts.” It may help to show your first list to a business advisor, close friend or colleague after explaining why you’re performing the Lose Weight Exercise and ask for feedback before and during the making the second list. If you don’t have someone on your side in this arena, get one. It’s always helpful to get a second pair of eyes on a problem especially with issues that are ultimately emotional ones.  Because these issues are so close to our sense of self that they are harder nuts to crack than simple decisions over what kind of packing tape to buy.

Finally, I’ve written this post while keeping the best business advice I’ve heard in a couple years in mind. I recently had the pleasure of taking a delivery from a man named Odell Odom who has provided trucking service to booksellers in the New York area for over 20 years. He’s seen them start small and get big and he’s seen them be big and get dead and this is what he told me: “Guys are making millions and going broke every day in this business. And the only difference between the two is what’s going on in the six inches between their ears.”

Overcoming the Odds to Make Your Book Business a Huge Success [ 6:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (168)

This is another guest post from a reader, Mike.  Mike is a budding online bookseller that is slowly beginning to see how selling books he once loved is turning into a thriving online business.  Ain’t online bookselling, great?

- Adam

Today will close out my first week as an online book-seller. All in all, I think I should be pretty happy with how things went.

To date, I have had 29 orders and once the three envelopes sitting on my kitchen table are dropped off at the mailbox, all 29 will have been shipped. Today, I received my first feedback from a customer. The feedback wasn’t much, but what it lacked in verbosity, it more than made up for in sentiment. The comment was simply, “Great!” The funny thing is, that’s exactly how I feel.

I find myself brainstorming for different ideas on how to get books. I’m constantly working through profit margins and revenue calculations in my head. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what my magic numbers are. For me, magic numbers are the number of books I want to sell each month, the total amount of money I want to make in a month, and the number of books I need in my inventory to reach those goals. I still haven’t recouped my costs yet, and it could be some time yet before that happens, but the upside is that I’m having so much fun. I find myself checking my email more frequently than ever looking for book orders. I’m excited to walk to the post office every morning and drop off my orders.

Continue Reading…

A Personal Story: Graduating From a Book Lover to a Bookseller [ 8:21 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (173)

This is the last installment of the series of posts written by reader Frank Giovinazzi.  Frank is a published author and can be found at his Amazon author page.  As always, please let me know what you think of Frank’s post by commenting on this post or clicking the Facebook Like button at the bottom.  Do you want to see more from Frank?

- Adam

Submitted for your amusement: You haven’t really gotten into the book business until you’ve gotten screwed.

My baptism came after I answered a Craiglist ad, promising, “Unchecked Boxes of Books! Perfect for Online Sellers! $6/Box is the Liquidation Price!”

I was still pretty new, a couple months in, and wanted to believe the ad so badly I bought 150 boxes — twice! – before figuring out the guy was unloading discards on me. Not a total loss, more like a small profit because I worked the books within an inch of their life, but to add insult to injury, the guy had a whole line of BS that included, “My family owns a bookstore, this is what they can’t handle,” and, “I’ve got customers that buy 10,000 books a month,” and, “I want you to make money so you can keep buying from me,” and so on.

Continue Reading…

Every Day is Talk Like a Pirate Day in the Book Business [ 8:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (149)

Today is the 2nd installment on the series of posts written by Frank Giovinazzi.  Frank can be found at his Amazon author page.  I hope you enjoy it!  Please let me know via the Comments and Reactions link above or by clicking on the Facebook Like button at the bottom if you like this change of pace or not.

- Adam

Extreme price erosion, or selling a book for less than half than what you originally listed it for, is a hard fact of life in the book business. When I first got started, I sold several copies of Death of a President by William Manchester, for between $35 and $50. Today, the first edition hardcover is selling for less than a buck. Now, I am a bibliophile by temperament, a writer by trade and blah and blah, and I know this book is an important piece of Americana and should sell for more and blah blah blah. So what? The free market doesn’t care what I think.

Several weeks ago I sold a rare copy of a book on 16 mm film camera operation for about $70. Awesome, right? I think so, but some people would get stuck on the observation that the title first listed at about $220 and bemoan the loss of the $150.

Not me. I don’t argue with Mr. [Book] Market. Unlike other areas of the economy, there are no government price controls in the book business, no bailouts, no FASB accounting tricks that allow us to print money out of thin air. If you want to sell books, you have to meet the buyer with the product they want at the price they are willing to pay.

Now some people reading this post will argue with themselves, the screen or in the comments and say they regularly sell books for more than the lowest price because they clean the covers with distilled ostrich urine or have signed copies or whatever and I will just laugh.  You cannot run a full-time, mortgage-and-car-loan-paying book business unless you compete on price and that means accepting price erosion as a fact.  Yes, I have occasionally sold books for more than the lowest price. Yes, I understand there are strategies for not leaving money on the table. And yes, I have a liquidator’s mindset, so I cut prices probably quicker and more sharply than most. But I also want to stay in business and not wind up like the failed booksellers whose inventory I have bought for pennies on the dollar because they can’t get their mind around the lowest price wins the sale concept.

In order to deal with what I consider a fact, I have three broad guidelines I operate by to protect my revenue against price erosion:

• I always remember a favorite adage of my Dad, “You make your money when you buy.” This is a common idea, and one worth remembering. It means if you buy cheaply enough, you can at least get your money out of a deal, whether it’s for one book or 10,000. One thing I am extremely sensitive to is when a seller has a knowledge of Amazon and tells you the most recent used price for a book. This usually occurs when he is asking $10 for a book selling for $20. “You’re doubling your money!” Good luck with that. My answer is to show him my back as I’m running to the car. My general rule of thumb is that I am looking for at least a 5-1 return on my outlay for books, and I especially remind myself of this if I happen to be running low on inventory and am out scrounging for whatever I can find. Desperate gamblers always loseWeight Exercise. Always.

• I am always pleased when I scan a book and the register rings – $25! Then I move on to the next book and the one after that and keep scanning with the goal of adding thousands of dollars to my inventory, and not thinking about a single $25 sale. Especially one that hasn’t happened yet. The point here is that I don’t count, or spend, money that is sitting on my shelf. Until the book sells and until I see the final sale price, the $25 is nothing more than a forecast of what I might possibly be seeing in revenue. Do I count it toward my goal of adding over $10,000 in inventory to my stock in the next X days? Absolutely, but I stay in motion, adding more inventory up and down the price range, and count the money when it’s in the bank. Which leads me to my final point:

• Volume. At the moment, I believe in volume as the best method to protect my revenue against price erosion. I understand there are booksellers with awesome exclusives for high-end titles in the $35 range, and they only have to sell a couple hundred books a month, but I haven’t achieved that kind of niche. Yet. Until I develop the kind of reliable, high-dollar inventory that gets me off the hamster wheel, I will crank out the inventory because it’s paying the bills while I learn and continue to develop foolproof sources of inventory. Volume gives me the kind of protection I need when titles that started at $25 sell for $8, and etc.

Price Erosion or Nightmare On Biblio Boulevard [ 6:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (170)

I am going to be switching things up a bit for the next 2 weeks. For the first time I will not be writing a new post for you regularly. I have decided to share a series of articles with you written by a loyal reader, Frank Giovinazzi. Frank is another successful bookseller and as it turns out is a published author as well. He has had books published called Zach Carter: Zombie Killer, The Potter’s Notebook and The Stoic Artist. Learn more about Frank at his Amazon author page.

If you like these articles please comment below. Also, if you would like to write some articles of your own to be posted with proper attribution to you please email me at adam[at]sellyourbooksonline.com (replace @ with [at]) to let me know what you’d like to write about.

Without further ado, here’s Frank’s maiden post:

- Adam

A common character trait among online sellers, especially beginners, is that they are what is politely known as “collectors.” The more accurate term is hoarders, though perhaps not in the same HazMat category as the poor subjects profiled in the reality show of the same name.

But when people first get into the business, they often do so at the behest of a concerned or exasperated family member [“Get that crap out of the damned garage already! Your brother's been dead for ten years!”], or because they need money, often because so much of their disposable income over the years has been dumped into acquiring sets of Balzac first editions or Batman and Robin ephemera.

And so they begin, re-categorizing the piles of kipple they have accumulated, writing long winded and pointless descriptions of the provenance of a new-in-box Richard Simmons Deal A Meal set, and slowly, selling off their belongings. What happens, while they are trying to satisfy the demands of their relations and/or creditors, is that they quietly wind up arranging their compulsions into two piles of junk – That Which Can Be Sold and That With Which I Will Never Part.

When I first got into the business I was aware of the reasons hoarders do the same, as well as the psychological tricks they play on themselves in a desperate attempt to keep their possessions in close proximity. So I made a decision – everything goes. I would sell every single book I owned, would keep nothing, would not hold back that new book still in its shrink wrap because I would get around to reading it some day, etc. Once I learned a little bit more about the business, I had to defend my decisions against the reality of prices, aka, “I’ll Be Able to Get More For That Stephen King First Edition When The Next Minivan Driven By a Character From His Novel Finally Finishes the Job.”

The decision, and following through on it, worked. It was hard at first, prying my own hot fingers off my collection of Charles Bukowskis, for example, but as I continued to sell everything, I believe I made the transition from Hoarder Selling Off his Junk to Small Business Person Making a Go Of It.

Along the way I have met many hoarders, or their relatives selling off their junk after their expiration date, and the impression is always the same – people hoard belongings as a way to hold onto life, in the mistaken notion that things outside of us define us, give us meaning, or by some magical transfer, can keep us on this planet longer than rational factors otherwise permit.

What I found is the opposite is true – by getting rid of stuff, cleaning out every nook and cranny where your obsessions have stuffed nonsense, that is the way to more life, to new experiences, meeting new people and traveling to new places. It’s only when you’re tied down by Grand Dad’s Old Cuckoo Clock that you’re prevented from living to the fullest, no matter how much false comfort the intricate mechanism provides, every hour on the hour.

Plus, if you really do simply enjoy tripping across old things, be they books or records or antique fixtures from General Stores, then having an ironclad No Hoarding Rule in your business and life, is the passport to coming across the millions of treasures that are stored away in other people’s Nut Pantries. What I’ve learned is that the momentary pleasure of handling something unique – I came across a scholarly book on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series this summer – is precisely the most enjoyment you will ever get out of it. Inanimate treasures, in my experience, are not a gift that keep on giving – unless of course, you read the book as I did and then turned around and sold it for thirty bucks.

The Hoarder Inside Me [ 5:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (198)