The BookThinker Newsletter ISSN 1547-9501 #100, 30 July 2007

BookThink Update
6 August 2007>>>

Update Announcements

The Empirical Bookman Prelude to Apprenticeship A Walk in the Rubble In the coming months you'll have the pleasure of getting to know Jaime Frontero, a living, breathing bookman who has been in the business for 56 years. He'll bring some serious depth to our understanding of bookselling, taking us off the much beaten, surfacy path of endless book buying and selling (and almost never standing back to see the bigger picture) - oh, and along the way he'll offer what will essentially add up to an online apprenticeship, something that some of us wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to experience. Maybe we should be charging for this! In any case, his first article, "Prelude to Apprenticeship: A Walk in the Rubble," appears today.

Selling on Amazon A Survival Guide Also with us today is Contributing Editor Steve Weber, who has, in my opinion, produced one of the most useful articles he's ever done for us. If you're an Amazon seller, this is information that you should print out immediately and keep no more than an arm's length away. Why? Because Steve has compiled a comprehensive selling guide that will help Marketplace sellers solve just about any problem that comes their way. Or at least give them the right tools to tackle it, including important Amazon email addresses, phone numbers, etc., that otherwise aren't posted publicly.

Gold Edition #41 How To Specialize in Bookselling Part III: Types of Specialties, Hypermoderns (2), General Fiction Issue #41 of the Gold Edition - Part II of the new series, How to Specialize in Bookselling, is now available for purchase. Purchase now.

From the Editor Important announcements for BookThinker readers.

Building a Website for Successful Bookselling How to Optimize Your eBay Store Kent Johnson is here today to discuss optimizing your eBay Store. What makes his approach interesting - and different from most - is that he looks at this from the perspective of somebody who has had significant experience building websites. Think about this: Your store's pages, though hosted on eBay, behave just the same as any website, and it would stand to reason that strategies for driving traffic to your store and realizing sales would often be identical to those used to optimize any website. Anyway, I'm sure you'll find some approaches in his article that you haven't used before and will likely benefit from.

Bookselling Business How to Earn Interest on Your Bookselling Income Next up is Associate Editor Pamela Palmer with a new column - Bookselling Business. Today she offers us some smart money-making tips for booksellers, including strategies for earning interest on the money you've earned from book sales and heretofore has been piling up in your accounts ... right?

Special Subscription Package BookThink's Gold Edition Plus BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books $59.99 Now available - Special Subscription Package includes a year of Gold Edition plus a year of Quarterly Market Report .... This can be used to start a new subscription or to extend current subscription(s). Click here.

BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books Issue #1 Issue #1 of BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books is now available for purchase. Purchase or subscribe now.

Previous BookThinker update-

BookThink Update
9 July 2007>>>

Update Announcements

How To Start A Clicks-and-Bricks Used Bookstore Organizing Your Business Part I: Naming Your Business Contributing Editor Jill Hendrix recently completed a series on how to write a business plan for a clicks-and-bricks used bookstore. If this seemed like an onerous undertaking to you, you may think that the next step - naming your business - would be by contrast both easy and fun. Well, of course, it could be, but it you trot through this step quickly and merrily, will you end up with a name that will power your business both today and in the future? Not likely. There are very important matters to consider here for open shop and online booksellers alike. Jill discusses them in detail in her article, "Naming Your Business."

The Best of Tomes, The Worst of Tomes Part II: A Guide to Selling Anthologies Part II of Ephemera Editor Michele Behan's series on anthologies appears today. This time she looks at that perennial collectible, The Story of Little Black Sambo, and how it can spell profits for otherwise ho-hum anthologies that contain the story. Along the way, there's plenty of historical background on Bannerman's classic and commentary on the ethics of marketing Black Americana.