What Is In The Book?

Latest changes to this page: 08/06/2006, 10:32 PST

This book is much more than a book of fundamentals, it includes many tips learned from experience to help you avoid making the same mistakes that I and others have made when starting an online bookselling business.  These mistakes are expensive and time consuming.  The fundamentals are free to anyone willing to put in the time to research the business on the Internet, but that is about all you will get from most books about online bookselling, i.e., a compilation of the fundamentals.

I have read several other books on this topic, some are very well written, but I have not seen one that is as comprehensive or instructional as my book.  I do not want to bad-mouth the works of other authors because the fundamentals are an important part of online bookselling, but the experience of learning the things I have pointed out in my book are going to be costly to learn on your own.

For example:

For the first couple years, the post office managed to lose 3% of all the books I shipped.  While this doesn't seem like many in the overall scheme of things, it has a substantial impact on the bottom line because:

1) You have to give the customer a full refund for both the book and shipping.

2) You are out the cost of the book.

3) You are out the postage you paid the post office to lose the book.

So, the book you thought you made money selling ends up losing you its initial purchase price plus the cost of paying the post office to lose it.

Suppose you paid $3.00 for a book initially and $1.84 for shipping.  That means you are out $14.52 for every 100 books you sell.  Now suppose that the three books that were lost had been sold for $20 each.  The difference between losing them and having them get delivered and keeping the money in your account instead of refunding your customers is $74.52, this is the impact to your bottom line.

Now, suppose you sell 400 books per month; this is a reasonable number for a small to moderately sized online bookseller.  Suddenly, the post office losing books has an impact of $298.08 per month on your bottom line.

This really frustrated me, so one day at the post office I discussed it with the clerk.  He had some great tips for packing my books to reduce the number of escapees.  I took his suggestions, modified them a bit to suit book packaging, and reduced the number of books the post office loses to an average of 0.03%.  That is a substantial reduction and a big difference in my bottom line.  Now instead of losing 3 out of every 100 books shipped, the post office is losing 3 out of 10,000, and I am only realizing a loss on my bottom line of $2.98 per month.  That means I am keeping $295.10 more in my pocket.

If you are contemplating getting into online bookselling, my packing tips alone will more than pay for the cost of my book in very short order.  If you are already an online bookseller, these tips could easily pay for the cost of my book in less than a week.

You are not going to find these tips in any other book about online bookselling, and I have even put color pictures in my book to make the tips clear.

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