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7 Tips on How to Profit from Library Book Sales
Hi, this is Nathan Holmquist. For this video, I’m going to show you 7 tips on how you
can boost your profits when you’re at library book sales or buying books to resell on Amazon.
So the first tip is to use Amazon FBA. This actually more of a requirement than a tip,
in my opinion. Generally because you’ll simply make more money per book, your books
will sell a lot faster, and your business will be automated and scalable for the most
part. So, in my opinion, it’s basically a no-brainer because of those 3 reasons. If
you need more proof on this, please visit my other video down at the bottom here. I
pretty much show you how you can make $3 profit more per book with FBA versus merchant fulfilled.
So that’s the first tip: to use Amazon FBA.
The second tip is to use a local database-scouting tool. What this just means is that all of
Amazon’s data is stored on a memory card, either on a smart phone or a PDA rather than
using the Internet connection. And I have 3 reasons why I prefer this. The first one
is that book sales require speed. There’s going to be other people there scanning for
books, and you really just don’t have time to go on the Internet. You have to know what
the value of the book is instantly. And with these scouting tools, you get the results
back in less than 1/10 of a second. There’s 2 companies that I know that have this and
that's Neatoscan and ASellerTool. You can either use your Android or iPhone, or you
could use the old-school method like I do and use the PDA scanner. So that's the second
tip.
The third tip is to buy books with a medium to low value. There's just a huge, huge number
of book with an Amazon value of under $5 on your book sales. Now, obviously I'm going
to buy books that have value of $20, $30, $50 as well, but there's only so many of those
books. So I like to concentrate on books that have an Amazon value of under $5. Primarily
because most booksellers ignore these books, so there's just going to be a ton of them.
With FBA, you can price these at a premium of over $10, so you can make money with them.
Just to give an example, last year from all the book sales that I went to, the average
merchant filled price was only $4.45 at all these sales that I went to. So when I say
merchant fulfilled, that just basically means $4.45 plus $4 on shipping when you're on Amazon.
So it looks like this. But with FBA, I was able to price those at $11.11. So I was able
to make money on those. I believe after fees, it's about $5 or $6. Actually, 25% of my profits
came from books with a merchant filled price of under $.99, so there's just a ton of these
seemingly worthless books, and a quarter of my profits came from these books because I
was able to price these books at over $10 on that FBA. So that's the third tip: take
advantage of these books with the medium to low value.
The fourth tip is to raise your sales rank criteria. Consider buying books that have
a sales rank of up to 2 million. Just anything under 2 million. Books that have a sales rank
between 1 and 2 million do actually sell. I did an experiment last summer, and I found
that about 50% of those books did sell within 7 months. And also the storage fees are just
really low, so you're really not going to be investing much money even it takes a year
for these books to sell. I like to use this chart as an example of just how low the storage
fees are. So this is a real sale that I went to in July last summer, and as you can see
the green is the profits that I made and the yellow is the storage fees. So the first month
I made close to $220, and the storage fees was only $1.99. So it's really not taking
much away from my profits. And all the way to the seventh month, I still made $64 on
the last month, and the storage fees was only $.56. So storage fees are really small. Consider
buying those books even if you think it's going to take a year to sell. You really won't
be investing that much money in month-to-month storage fees.
The fifth tip is to go to unadvertised book sales. Library book sales that are listed
on BookSaleFinder.com, which is most of the ones that you'll go to. It's most of the ones
that I go to. There's just going to other people there with scanner, which is fine.
But obviously, if you can find a library book sale that's not advertise, there's a good
chance you'll be the only one there with a scanner. There is a membership website called
BookSalesFound. It's $10 a month. I'm a subscriber. It does work. I went to one last July and
I was the only one there with a scanner, and I made over $800 on it. So consider just finding
these unadvertised book sales. It's not hard to do. you can call around if you don't want
to be a member to BookSalesFound.com. You could call around or email sales and just
ask when their next annual book sale is.
The sixth tip is to attend the last day of the sale. Generally, a book sale will have
a preview night and it'll cost, like, $10 to get in. There'll be a couple days in the
middle, and on the last day, they'll have a bag sale. The prices usually drop to $5
to $10 a bag, which is about $.10 a book. So essentially you're getting them for free
almost, and that'll really boost up your profits. The best bag sale I had last year, I went
to one last March. It was over $730 and counting, so you can make money from those bag sales.
And the seventh tip is just to buy in bulk in general. Aim to buy 200 or more books when
you're at a sale. Not surprisingly, the top 5 book sales that I went to last year, they
were all sales in which I bought over 200 books. Remember Fulfilling By Amazon is a
scalable business model. You're business can handle 1,000 orders per day just as easily
as 10 orders per day. Once they're in Amazon's warehouse. So why not take advantage of that
scalability and just ship as many reasonable books as you can to Amazon and take advantage
of that? So aim to buy 200 or more books if you can. It'll really increase your profits.
And those are the 7 tips that I have for you. Here are they are again:
1. Use FBA, which is more of a requirement. 2. Use a local database-scouting tool so you
can get the results back immediately. 3. Buy books of medium to low value. There’s
just plenty of books that have medium to low value that you can scoop up and send to Amazon.
4. Raise your sales rank criteria to up to 2 million. Storage fees are super low.
5. Go to unadvertised book sales. BookSalesFound.com is a membership site where you can do that.
6. Go to the last day of the sale. Get the books for cheap.
7. In general, buy in bulk and take advantage of the scalability of Amazon FBA
So those are the 7 tips. For more information on profiting from book sales and books on
Amazon FBA, please go to my website at SellFBA.com. You can subscribe to my newsletter there,
get more information. You also get a free book that I wrote on Amazon FBA. Or you can
visit my blog at BookToTheFuture.com. So thanks for watching this video, and I'll see you
next time. Thank