Is This For You?

Is now the time to realize your dream of becoming a bookseller, of working from your home, of using your love of books and your entrepreneurial energy to create a full-time or significant part-time income for yourself and your family?

Running a bookstore is one of those occupations, like opening a restaurant or managing a major league baseball team, which tends to attract a great many individuals with rather romanticized conceptions of what is involved.  It’s just, you know, what they have always wanted to do.  To put it another way, at the risk of a bit of literary name-dropping, we can quote the often intriguing 20th century literary critic and memoirist Anatole Broyard:  

“To own a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.”

What could be more fun!

Well, get a grip, please. Thousands of people fail at running bookstores, thousands of people fail at running restaurants, and in the process they learn that much of the work involved is not fun at all, much less what they have always wanted to do. Since thousands of people also fail at running fantasy baseball teams, it’s probably a blessing that they never get the chance to manage real human beings on major league baseball teams.

Now, the advent of online used bookselling has greatly lowered the stakes involved in failing as a used bookseller. Instead of losing anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 and having to hire a lawyer to negotiate one’s way out of a multi-year lease and a mountain of publisher and distributor debt, a failed online used bookseller might lose $500 and a lot of time and effort. But it remains true that many will fail.

It doesn’t have to be this way, so our mission with this book is three-fold:

· First, we hope that by providing a candid look at the nitty-gritty of used bookselling, to persuade a significant number of people to do something else for which they may be better suited;

· Second, we believe we can provide and organize information and suggestions that may accelerate progress on the learning curve and make the difference between success and failure for a significant number of current and future online used booksellers; and

· Third, we hope to improve the overall quality and market strength of online used bookselling by helping sellers to raise the bar when it comes to customer service and fulfillment, business practices and efficiencies, diversity of offerings, and pricing strategy, with the result that the ensuing improvement in customer experience will ultimately mean more customers and more selling for the sellers.

Let’s start by suggesting some things that would be very helpful qualities if you want both to prosper and to be happy as an online bookseller.

We could make the following into one of those litmus test quizzes where you can score 17 to 20 and be Jeff Bezos or 0 to 3 and be Maynard G. Krebs, but it would be better if we could make it into more of a conversation. None of these are absolutes, but it would be a good starting point for you to take each of the descriptive lines below, weigh it, and have a conversation with yourself or with a friend or partner about whether it fits you (or the two of you as a team, if you are planning to do this together). If not, is there something that stands adequately in its place? The point is not to determine whether or not you can do it well, “it” being the things one must do as an online bookseller. The real conversation is about whether you will enjoy it enough to continue doing it well, and to grow in your ability to do it, over a year, five years, or ten years. So let’s see.

You know and love books. You enjoy being around books and the people who read them. You see books as having terrific powers to entertain, to educate, to illumine, to heal, and to amuse. You love to buy books.

You want to work at home or in a small shop, but you are prepared to treat it like a real job and you can give it an absolute minimum of thirty hours per week. If you can give it 45 hours a week, and you have sources of books to sustain that much work, you will do better, assuming you use your time wisely and don’t use up all your time on bookselling message boards talking about what you should be doing.

You need after-tax income of $20,000 to $40,000, and you would love to see it exceed $50,000, but you are not driven by a hunger to become a millionaire. The online bookselling message boards were abuzz on the evening of Sunday, March 3, 2002 with chitchat about the inclusion of a Lyme, New Hampshire woman named Isabelle McMillen in Parade Magazine’s annual “What Americans Earn,” with a stated income of $45,000 attributed to her chosen profession of “online bookselling.” “Is that her gross? Is that her net? How does she do it?” came the recurring questions from dozens of message-posters. The post that got my attention, though, was the one that noted an invitation for her to join the message board but lamented that with 11 pages of eBay listings she was not going to have time to keep up with the myriad discussions on the board. Exactly, I thought. $45,000 can go a long way in rural New Hampshire, and Ms. McMillen and her husband are doing well with www.bookbaker.com because they have a solid business plan, knowledge of the items they buy and sell, and a willingness to keep their focus on their work rather than peripheral matters.

You like, respect, and identify with people and you want to run an honest business. A cheerful disposition and a willingness to deal openly and straightforwardly with the people you encounter in your business will be a tremendous plus, because amongst the hundreds of great people you will encounter, there will also be scattered some real beauts. If you let them get your goat you will lose business as well as less tangible things like peace of mind.

You have some basic business sense, organization, and competence. File folders, spreadsheets, lists, budgets, cash flow planning … are you familiar with these things? Can you learn how to use them if you don’t already know how? Does the mere idea of them give you a headache? Remember, nobody is forcing you to take this “job”. But if you take it, these things are part of it. Even if you see this as a hobby, you must be prepared to run it like a business.

You don’t mind doing some drudgework on a regular basis, but … you are also willing to use your noggin to figure out or borrow ways to “work smart.” I’ve never met a bookseller who didn’t enjoy buying books, whether new or used, but after that the unanimity about enjoying specific tasks falls off quickly. Posting books on the net, schlepping books, repairing books, picking and packing books, going to the post office – these are some of the daily rituals. You can take pride in doing them well, and you can find ways to do them more efficiently, but it is unlikely you will ever see them either as intellectual challenges or as great fun. If you consider them “beneath you,” keep the day job.

You want to choose the books you stock rather than be a slave to the whims of the publishing industry. I am writing this book mostly for the used and antiquarian bookseller, and this one is true for brick-and-mortar used book stores but even more true for online sellers: your focus can be solely on what you want to have in stock. Nobody is likely to “walk in” to your online store and ask why you don’t carry the latest literary products of Danielle Steel or Rush Limbaugh, and there won’t be any publishers knocking on your door to ask you to take a 96-copy display of Britney Spears’ illustrated autobiography.

You enjoy going to yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, libraries, thrift shops, used bookstores, and even the town dump. If looking for books is drudgery to you, this is not for you. Finding creative ways to build an uncommon inventory may be the single most important element in determining how well you do at this enterprise, so let it be fun!

You get a kick out of the thrill of seeking out, and the joy of occasionally finding, hidden treasures. Maybe this is redundant with the previous point, but in my first writing job as a teen-aged stringer covering the Cape Cod Baseball League I was paid by the column inch, so I have always kind of discounted Hemingway’s advice about the need for writers to cut their work relentlessly. It’s staying in.

You have available & appropriate space. Appropriate space means space that is clean, dry, well lit, and hopefully not in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment. You need to be able to fill the space with shelving, tables, boxes, and a desk and guard it from the kids, the dog, the cat, and other unforeseen pests. You’ll need, at the very least, one good-sized room that offers at least 150 square feet, but more is always better.

You are at least 18 years of age, able to enter into legally binding contracts and obtain necessary licenses, and you have a checking account and a usable credit card.

You are computer literate and you have a good computer with a good Internet connection. More about this later, but being handy with a computer can light your way to a lot of work-saving shortcuts.

You have a reasonably strong back and the ability to lug around boxes of books when you purchase them, when you post them, and again when you sell them.

You have a reasonably strong and comfortable office chair at your computer workstation. Trust me. This may even make a difference in your customer service, and it will definitely make a difference in how your back feels after you post a hundred books online.

You have $500 for startup costs. You may be able to get started on half that much, but as we’ll see later $500 will set you up just fine for you first month of business, and from that point on you should be able to meet all expenses easily out of your revenues.

You understand and embrace the central role that marketing plays in any business, and you don’t feel the need to take a shower whenever you so much as contemplate things such as using e-mail to build your business, making your prices competitive, or trying to make your virtual bookshop a little more like Amazon’s and a little less like the local public library. I can’t emphasize this enough. Whenever I listen to online booksellers describe their business, the number of them who refuse to grant any role for marketing in their efforts amazes me. It is truly as if some of them believe that they can post their books online and simply wait for the buyers to start sending money. This is not the world in which we are doing business, and if marketing yourself and your business makes you squeamish or strikes you as a little unseemly, please put this book down and think of doing something else.

As you’ve read through this, maybe each and every point has been a bulls-eye in describing you. Maybe there have been a few that didn’t quite fit, but you could figure out a way around them. So, time to quit the day job, right?

No.

Please.

Stop.

Let me put that another way.

STOP!

Before you make any rash decisions, I strongly urge that you consider your support system. Back in the Eighties, I think the term was “safety net.”

If you have a day job, keep it until you have proven to yourself that you no longer need it. That day may come, but there is no point in putting extra pressure on yourself before it arrives. Although I have already suggested that you should have 30 hours a week available to do justice to your future as an online bookseller, I will now contradict myself and declare that it may well be worth going through a transitional period wherein you work at it for 15 to 20 hours a week to get things going. You may well find that you can generate $1,000 a month in income during this transitional period, and if you can do that, then there is a good chance that you can build yourself up to a respectable income if you do it full-time.

But as you build your business, beware of making projections based on too little information. So many online booksellers have had the experience of posting a large number of books online all at once and seeing a significant number of them turn over – or sell -- very quickly, that the phenomenon even has a name. If you post two thousand books this week and they are all competitively priced, you stand a good chance of selling four or five hundred of them in the next 30 days! That tells you a lot about the value of fresh listings. What it does not tell you is what you can expect as a normal inventory turnover rate. So please don’t make the mistake of telling yourself that maintaining an inventory of two thousand books will mean ongoing monthly sales of five hundred books.