Friday 30 March 2012

Quality secondhand paperbacks, a booksellers tip.


Yesterday it being my day off I meanders around Thanet mostly buying books from the local charity shops for stock in my bookshop.

People are always asking me what sort of books I want to buy, because granny has died or they are downsizing and a great many of the books that people want to sell are ordinary sized paperbacks.

Now at the moment you can buy most paperbacks secondhand on the internet from Amazon and most of them are listed with prices starting at 1p this means that when you add on the Amazon postage they cost £2.81.

In order to balance this out and ensure that I have a good stock of books I tend to price the more common paperbacks at anything between 99p and £2.50 to ensure that I will be cheaper than my main competition.

The paperback titles that I never seem to gat enough of I generally price at £2.99 or £3.50 in the hope that a proportion of my customers will buy them cheaper online and I can maintain a reasonably good stock.

This inevitably means that I can pay more for these ones when people come to sell them, so I though a picture of the paperbacks that I selected from the thousands in the local charity shops would be helpful to give some idea of what I call a quality paperback.

Classics feature in this as do uncommon titles by authors that are normally very common, like Agatha Christie, anyway if you expand the picture of the paperbacks I bought yesterday which I paid about £60 for it should give you some idea of what I mean.        

I would guess that they will sell for about £200 over the course of about a year and the added costs will be my petrol, parking and of course most of day doing what I call work for want of a better name. 

1 comment:

  1. I will one day manage to get over and buy some books.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.