Where Love Has Gone

The phrases "books are everywhere" and "there are plenty of books out there for everybody" and others were once kicked around repeatedly. In a sense, books may still be everywhere, but are there enough of them to make selling them worth bothering with? Based on what I'm hearing, sourcing is a major, sometimes insurmountable difficulty for many now.

In response, some sellers have lowered the bar on what they'll buy for resale, as if ramping up efficiencies in the buying-and-selling process will be the answer. $5 and $10 sales do add up if you increase your inventory, sure, but at what cost? This is the classic recipe for bookselling burnout: Spending so much time acquiring and processing low-dollar books that you almost forget the books themselves and force yourself to become a bar-code grunt, inevitably lowering your hourly return, filling up every last piece of real estate in your home with books and forcing yourself to work Sundays.

There's an image I saw on a bookselling group recently that I can't get out of my mind. It's poignant to me, though others may gush. It was an interior shot of a warehouse (I think rented) housing dozens of unopened gaylords of books. This seller bought them by the truck load. I could not believe the replies from other sellers salivating on what could be realized by selling them. Thousands of dollars. My thought was, run.

It isn't all this bad. Some sellers still attempt to game the sourcing system, say, by inserting themselves into situations where they score the first pick at incoming books. They volunteer at thrift shops, donate their time in exchange for this privilege. Just one example, and at least now and again a successful approach. But even these sources often go away when store managers get wind of what's happening and hire somebody, armed with a scanner, to evaluate donations and list them for sale minus the picking opportunity.

I could cite many other types of sellers who attempt to re-imagine methods of obtaining salable books to get a leg up on the bookselling competition, including getting in line for an estate sale at three in the morning and steeling yourself for a battle when the door opens, but they all have one thing in common: Sooner or later, the easy stuff goes away or becomes less accessible by the ever increasing competition.

Speaking of things that go away, however, there is, in my opinion, one and only one source that always remains in large numbers: clueless sellers, usually new sellers but not always. Sometimes experienced sllers but nevertheless clueless. Over the BookThink epoch I've written countless articles and forum posts in an attempt to show why most booksellers come and go and only a few make enough to build a career out of it. I can distill this advice into one sentence: Sell collectible books.

Surely you've heard this before, but I'd like to elaborate on this today, take it in a slightly different direction. Yes, collectible books are more profitable, but aren't we presented with the very same sourcing difficulty - in fact, isn't sourcing even more difficult? Yes, it can be, but I maintain that the difficulty isn't in finding these books; it's in buying them at a price the gives you room for profit. If there's a catch, this is it.

But what exactly does buying them at a price you can do something with mean? Are we talking only about books that every Tom, Dick and Harry could make money on? Absolutely not, and here's where I repeat myself once again: Give a book to ten different booksellers, and there will be ten different outcomes. The spread between highest and lowest outcomes can be potentially dramatic. The best confirmation of this is to do a search on a database that displays results of sales from today and many years ago. Again and again and again you'll see $10 or $20 books with one or more outliers - the very same books that well for $100 or more.

The reasons for this are many, some you can control and some not. Luck is one you can't control, though some say it's possible to make your luck, and I concede that you can increase the odds at times. But that's not where I'm going with this. No, there is one approach that, if focused on vigilantly, will always deliver results by way of separating yourself from the competition. Obviously, it's not pointing a scanner at a bar code and noting the price a book is selling for online. Anybody can do this. And I can almost guarantee that, if you live by the scanner, you'll die by it. However, what everybody can't do - or more likely just won't do - is acquire knowledge. This changes your perspective immediately. Instead of buying on the basis of current asking prices or even historical prices, you ask yourself, "What can I do to build value into this book that almost nobody else can?"

Returning to my reference to Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Message in Part I, I'd like you to ponder this chilling excerpt from it, and I'm guessing that McLuhan had no idea how prescient he was in foreshadowing the explosive arrival of AI, or Artificial Intelligence, 61 years later:

This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence.

I don't know about you, but I can readily visualize myself scratching my head and asking, at this point, "Where has love gone? Has an electronic brain crowded it out?" If this sounds overly saccharine, stay with me for a few more minutes, and I promise I'll get back to where I started.

The following is just one example off the top of my head:

There is a now largely forgotten "modern" folk singer who made at least a somewhat visible impact on the American music scene in the 1970's and 1980's named Cheryl Wheeler.

Amongst others, she wrote a song titled "Arrow." Since links are so often perishable, look for a YouTube video where Chet Atkins introduces her to an audience and she sings it. Here are the lyrics leading in:

I wish I could fall in love Though it only leads to trouble, oh, I know it does Still, I'd fool myself and gladly just to feel I was In love, in love

I wish I could feel my heartbeat rise And gaze into some gentle, warm, excited eyes And give myself as truly as an arrow flies In windless skies

Oh, I remember you in the TV light Holding you close to me where we lay And now I wish I knew some of those softer nights Whispering quietly, feeling you turn to me

It was only last night in the winter dark I dreamed of how you loved in all your innocence And I've never known a softer, warmer feeling since Or a truer heart

I'm quoting this here because, when I first heard the song, specifically the second verse, I saw that it precisely captured the essence of what I strive to find in books I'm considering buying and, in turn, communicating at least a part of this essence, part of the time, in my descriptions and more often in photos. For what it's worth, the arrow went right through me to a heart that still beat on.

This isn't the entire story because much of my descriptive/photographic content in selling books features factual, neutral stuff - the bones of what a book is in a bibliographic sense, etc., but even this often requires knowledge that a scanner won't deliver, and even this, say, in the selection and quality of photos potentially evokes a response from a buyer. The former part of the story - the essence - for lack of a better word, comes from the soul. There's no question in my mind that both of these factors are potentially value enhancing and, if successfully manifested, will place you at or near the top of those ten hypothetical booksellers I referred to above. Why? It's because you care about the book enough to sell it with all you can give.

Now, back to where I started. Ultimately, buying inventory will never fail you at this source:

This it it.

I promise.

It's

YOU.

In Part III of this series of articles, I'm going to offer my take on AI in this context of sourcing. It's young, yes, and almost hasn't learned how to walk, and if you currently use it to build book descriptions on eBay or wherever, at best you're likely going to be ignored but at worst be off-putting to buyers - or just look like a hack, or even worse, a fool who doesn't know what you're doing. As young as AI is, however, there are things you can do to help you upgrade your descriptions - build value into them, quickly - and maybe, just maybe take you soul deep.