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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Reason Why People Have Penny Books For Sale on Amazon product entry.

Anyone spending any time at all on Amazon product entry will notice the penny books for sale. And there aren't just one or two copies for sale but sometimes hundreds of copies. Do people really make money selling books for a penny? Why do they list them for only a penny? I know curiosity drives some people to pursue an answer because they are wondering if they are missing a sales opportunity. The one sure way to get flamed in the Amazon forums is to ask these questions there. You will promptly be scolded for not searching for an answer prior to posting the question. After all, the logic goes; this question is asked about once an hour on the forums and has been answered hundreds of times. Just look it up!

The only problem is I have looked it up and the explanations given in the "answer" are partial answers at best. So I have decided to stick my neck out, go on the record, and attempt a more thorough answer. After all, if you are an expert in online book selling you should be able to answer this one right? It's like the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin for a theologian or why the Detroit Lions can't win a super bowl for a sports analyst (or win a game for that matter). So sit back, relax, and let me explain.

The first concept to understand is a product called a re-pricer. This product will check each listing you have on a venue like Amazon and compare your price with all other current listings and then update your price for that item based on rules you set. You can choose for example to be the cheapest, the most expensive or in the middle of the pack price wise. You also have some control over how often your re-pricer will run. This is typically a stand alone product you purchase, a web based service, or some venues even have it built in like Alibris.com. The tool is based on the theory that people will buy the cheapest product that meets their needs.

This has been validated to a great extent by the new media venue Glyde.com which recently went online to compete with larger retail sites. When you go there to buy you will only see the cheapest listing for any one product in a particular condition. If you look for a book you will see one price for new and one for excellent for example. When you list an item to sell there you are given a suggested price for that item at its condition and when you enter your desired price they give you your location in the queue. Until you are the cheapest one (first in the queue) you won't have a chance at a sale.

The second concept involves understanding the priorities in the day-to-day activities of a large commercial online bookstore. Let's say you have 20,000 books online and are selling 100+ books a day. You get paid when books sell. This means you have to list books to sell them. Once they sell you have to get them in the mail ASAP to keep Amazon and your buyer happy. The more you list the more you sell and the more you make. That is your priority and to keep overhead down you hire just enough staff to ensure you get your priorities done in a timely fashion.

The last concept to understand is acceptable profit. What I mean by that is where do you look to judge your success? Do you feel like a failure if you don't make a profit on each item sold or do you look at the overall numbers and judge based on them. When I was running an on-line bookstore I was happy when overhead was under five grand and total sales were over fifteen grand. I figured if I lost a few dollars on a few books a month it was acceptable given my overall profit. After all no one is perfect.

This process continues until you are both. You don't really notice though because you would have to allocate time to look for this. Once identified you would have to pay someone to find the book on the shelf, de-list it from your venues and then pay to have it disposed of. You are not only paying for this whole process but you are also diverting resources away from listing new books, thus reducing the number of books you sell. The cost to you then to eliminate the penny books is much more than selling the book and shipping it at a penny. When shelf space becomes tight and you need to eliminate the older books not sold to make room for new ones that will sell you systematically eliminate the lower priced older books and dispose of them. I used to do this once every six months or so. By doing it once or twice a year you can optimize the process and keep the effect on your sales to a minimum.

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How to Sell Books on Amazon.

Authors know that getting their books listed at Amazon is crucial for book sales. More and more readers are making Amazon lisitng Service their first place to go to purchase books, and with Amazon's free shipping options and the convenience of shopping from home, that trend is not going to change. But Amazon offers different options to authors to sell their books, which can be both confusing and time-consuming to unravel. Here are some simple ways to maneuver through that process.

Amazon offers basically three ways to sell your book at its online store: 1) listing the book at Amazon and then shipping copies to Amazon, 2) having a seller's account, or 3) selling your book for Kindle. I will focus on just the first two options, which relate to printed rather than digital books.

What are the differences between having Amazon sell your book and your creating a seller's account to sell your book yourself at Amazon? Time and money. As an author, you will have to decide whether time or money is more important to you in working with Amazon, or you can balance out both ways at least until you decide which works best for you. Below are explanations for how to do both and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

List Your Book for Amazon to Sell

How: This requires creating an "Amazon Advantage" account, perhaps aptly named because Amazon rather than the author receives most of the advantage. To join, you need copies of your book, an ISBN, and a bar code. Then visit Amazon Advantage. Follow the steps but read the fine print. Amazon charges an annual fee ($29.95 currently and nonrefundable whether or not any of your books sell) and its commission is 55% of your retail price. Amazon will notify you to send books and how many. You pay the shipping and have no say over the number you send. If Amazon wants fifty, you pay the shipping on fifty, even if the books don't sell. If Amazon only wants two at a time, you may find yourself making frequent small shipments which can be time consuming and more costly than one large shipment if your book is selling steadily.

Advantage: Once Amazon receives your books and starts selling them, you don't have to deal with mailing out individual orders.

Be an Independent Seller Through Amazon

How: You can't sell your book independently on Amazon until it is listed there, so regardless, your book needs an Amazon Advantage account. You can follow the steps above, become an Amazon Advantage client, and then later tell Amazon the book is no longer available, or if you are traditionally published, published by a subsidy press, or sign up with a distributor like Ingram, your publisher or distributor will create your Amazon Advantage account for you and pay the fees, just giving you the royalties you agreed on with the publisher or distributor. Today, many independent printers and book design firms will also list books at Amazon for self-published authors and simply charge a small flat one-time fee (usually around $50) to list your book for you. The book can be listed as out of stock, meaning Amazon has no copies, and you don't need to send them any.

Once your book has a listing at Amazon, you can open a seller account with Amazon to sell your book independently. First, look up your book title on Amazon. On the right side of the screen for your Amazon listing is a little boxed area with the question, "Have one to sell?" followed by a button to click on that says, "Sell Yours Here." Click the button and follow the steps to list your book and your information. You can list as many copies available as you like, provided you have that many copies in stock. Customers can now buy the book directly from you rather than Amazon. You pay nothing to Amazon until the book sells.

Another advantage to an individual seller account is that while Amazon may list your book at retail of in your seller account you can list it slightly under that price so it appears less expensive to customers. You can also list the book, not only as "New" but include that it is autographed by the author and personally shipped by him or her. Even if you sign the books you ship directly to Amazon, Amazon won't advertise for you that they are autographed, so listing your books on your seller account as "signed by the author" may be an advantage for you. Many readers will feel an autographed book is of more value than one that is not.

A final advantage is that you get your buyer's address and email information, so you know more about your customer than you would if Amazon had sold the book. You can retain that information for future marketing mailings or updates to the customer when your next book comes out. Eventually, you might persuade the customer to buy directly through your website rather than through Amazon, thus giving you a greater profit in sales.

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http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Sell-Books-on-Amazon&id=4251616

How Authors Can Optimize Listings on Amazon For Maximum Sales.

Amazon.com is the hands-down leader in the online bookselling marketplace. Amazon product listing is also a company that prides itself on meeting its customers' needs. What's the easiest way to drive sales for your book on Amazon.com? Easy: Maximize the content on your product page and optimize your chances of coming up in search results via Amazon's internal search engine.

You've all heard of optimizing your website, optimizing your web presence, optimizing your blog, and other variations on the same. All of this optimizing is intended to increase your visibility through various online search mechanisms. While self-contained, Amazon.com is a powerhouse search engine by its own right. Despite being a retail site, it should be treated as a search engine from an online marketing standpoint. Think about it: What's the first site you go to when searching for information on a book? My guess is that you answered "Amazon". Remember that on top of its own strong brand, Amazon powers the virtual marketplace of Target.com's backend service (amongst other merchant partnerships).

To leverage Amazon's power, a major component of your online marketing strategy should involve making your Amazon.com product page as informative, search-optimized, and consumer-friendly as possible. Frequently, optimizing Amazon pages that the product's rank improves as it collects additional content. Whether search suggestions, tags, inclusion in Listmania lists and so on plus the resulting number of hits have a direct effect on the sales rank formula is unclear; it's more likely that books with more detailed pages and links to the title information from outside pages simply attract more buyers. Regardless, ensure that your product page does a good job of representing your product with no detail spared.

Amazon offers many features to enhance your title listing that, when properly implemented, can increase page views and potential sales for your title. Understanding and executing these programs has been historically time-consuming work, but since Amazon.com is a content-driven site, the benefits are clear. The more visits you get to your book detail page, the more popular your book will become in the eyes of the Amazon internal search results algorithm. The Amazon algorithm favors the most popular items, so if two different products match a user's criteria, the more user-popular item will show up first. Our Amazon optimization work has uncovered some powerful tools for influencing Amazon search results, as outlined in very basic terms below: