Are You Pricing Yourself Out of Business?

There's was a time years ago that, when somebody asked me what I did for a living, I answered, "I sell over-priced books to people with too much money." This usually elicited a smile … and perhaps it gave a few people pause, who may have pondered to themselves, "Hmm, I never thought of doing it that way." A more cynical thought might be, "Isn't this sort of … stealing? Or at the very least, taking advantage of others?"

Have you ever asked yourself what your motivations were for pricing the books you sell? I'm guessing that most of you think in terms of pricing things competitively, assuming that you've acquired them at a low enough price to realize a profit worth bothering with. By "competitively" I mean pricing at a level more or less what other booksellers are selling their books for, perhaps more often somewhat less to gain an edge. Most likely, this implies a tactic based on a more general strategy of out-hustling your competitors, both in sourcing and selling, and spending as little money, time and energy as possible during the process. It's funny, in a way, that this approach sometimes evolves to an extent of getting your foot in the door of liquidators who will sell you gaylords of "unpicked" books and you necessarily renting a warehouse to store and process them in while you make your millions.

More power to them, right?

Of course, there's a limit to how many sellers can operate at this level, and the rest of us are left to pick up the leftovers - that is, if this is your strategy. And, perhaps more importantly, this strategy has an expiration date. ALWAYS. The rest of us, for the time being, will have to settle for making thousands instead.

One could make the argument that this species of bookselling is inorganic in the sense that it minimizes personal involvement with individual books; where as an organic approach would maximize the human element, that is, entail human involvement that sprouts from a seed, grows, and ultimately propagates, if slowly.

For years now I've advocated for organic bookselling, an approach that involves building value into books that deliver higher profits and more consistent sales, one by one, not gaylord by gaylord. For many this is a slow go. There's so much to learn, and it's safe to say that any one person can only learn a fraction of what's out there. "Building value into books" is also a strategy, one in which anybody can overcome deficiencies in knowledge by way of digging into what makes a discrete book valuable in the first place - something a bar code will never teach you. It's also, at least in one's lifetime, a strategy that has an indefinitely long shelf life.

I've spent much time at BookThink urging other booksellers to not only use this strategy but attempted to offer as many tactics as possible to execute it. Today I'm offering one that dovetails into the selling-overpriced-books-to-people-with-too-much-money tactic, and this one, oddly enough, arises from one of BookThink's Proverbs of Bookselling, perhaps one of its most misunderstood one: "All roads lead to eBay."

To put it simply, this particular road is a one less traveled: Price all of your books ambitiously - overprice them, if you will, at a fixed price - and insert the Best Offer feature.

An aside. The efficacy of the Best Offer feature is one that has been discussed among booksellers for many years, and the usually profound(?) answer is that, if you use it, you will almost guarantee that you'll sell your book for less money than you're asking for it. But here's the big but. The price you're seeking is lower than the price you're asking for. It's somewhere between this and what you'll actually sell it for, which in turn is almost always higher than what a competing bookseller will sell it for. I stand by this assertion because I've seen it happen in my own business thousands of times.

So, you might be thinking that potential buyers will almost certainly bypass your listing because it's obviously overpriced. Some will. But there are things you can do to lower the number of passersby. The first thing is easy. You've overpriced it, and this, if nothing else, will grab some attention if nothing else. However, it might also tempt buyers to open your listing and look for reasons why it's overpriced. If attractive features like flawless condition, author-signed, etc., aren't present, guess what? You've still got them in the door. And that's when you bring out the guns.

What guns? Too many to mention here, but you can start with a description that boldly points to what makes your book special. This requires some sort of human involvement. Digging. Or your photos might be so brilliant that they stand head and shoulders over the hasty snapshots most booksellers toss up. And this includes easily a percentage approaching 100. No exaggeration. Your bibliographic knowledge might also surprise buyers, especially if you cite existing bibliographies or enumerate first edition issue points based on careful research. In a time when dishonesty is rampant and so many work habits sloppy at best, this can be a refreshing break from it. Essentially, try to do whatever you think might hold an observer's attention, and the longer you can hold it, the better chance you'll get your crazy price or an offer that's well above the usual outcome.

This reminds me of an incident that occurred several years ago. I had listed a jacketed first edition of William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country at a price well above the then current comps of copies that hadn't sold, and I received a message from an eBay buyer (or seller) that literally mocked me for being a fool to ask for anything near my ambitious price. He cited prices of what the book should sell for, literally $100 or more cheaper. I learned very early on to not respond to messages like this, but imagine my smile when it sold a few months later at my elevated price. But back to the Best Offer feature. This is also an eye grabber. It nearly always means that the seller is willing to come down on price and meet you at some level. My experience is that outcomes of subsequent haggling almost always settle at a price that more than satisfies what I want to get. BTW, have you noticed that eBay is the only major bookselling venue that has facilitated the price negotiation process?

Two final notes here, and the first is you can't make a purse out of a sow's ear. This tactic works best with uncommon, in-demand books, or at least books that you personally have discovered to be of value based on research. I've recently published several examples of the latter in the BookThink newsletter. Scroll down some on the BookThink home page to find them. Second, some of the books that perform well with this tactic are long-tails - books that take some time to sell. Patience is important, and avoid as best you can temporarily "hot" books but look for more durably collectible things to sell. Also, there is a phenomenon I've named "critical mass bookselling" afoot that will offset to a large extent the long-tail issue. Click here for more details.