How I Turned My Business Around in One Weekend by Judy Lanskey #108, 26 November 2007

I don't know how many of you felt that Craig was addressing you, personally, in his most recent Gold Premium Edition (October 17 issue), but I certainly did. He may as well have put my name on it. I entered bookselling by listing my own personal books. In those golden, early days of 2005, every book I listed seemed valuable, giving me a badly skewed notion that I could make an easy full-time living while working part-time.

Well, reality intruded. Although I worked at my bookselling business full-time, it usually yielded a barely adequate part-time income. I attended FOLs and dragged home mountains of books that turned out to be 50% rejects and what seemed like 50% slow movers. So, after reading Craig's article, I turned to him for advice. As a single mom with two special needs boys, I have a strong desire to remain at home for them until they finish school. My business goal is simple: I want to double what is currently a good monthly income for me ($1,000) and bring in at least $24,000 yearly.

Craig's first suggested getting a scanner. He believed taking that one step alone might make up the difference I was seeking. In less than two weeks that suggestion turned my business around.

ASellerTool arrived on Thursday, October 25. As promised, it was ready to use right out of the box. My boys were spending that weekend with their Dad, so I was free to play with the new toy. I started scanning everything in the house with a bar code - boxes of books that I hadn't gotten around to listing, books on the floor in my closets, CDs, DVDs, etc. If it had a bar code, I scanned it. What a surprise! By late Thursday evening, I had 74 listable items.

The scanner helped me sort through all my stuff and divide it into three piles: rejects (9 bags!), listable items, and valuable items. Seems that some photography books sitting on my shelves had gone out of print and upwards in value. Getting rid of the dreck was energizing. It motivated me to go through the now smaller pile of pre-ISBN books and spend an hour getting listing or bagging them.

Late Thursday evening, I started a listing frenzy that ended Friday morning. One small sale came through Thursday. On Friday, 12 more items sold, and on Saturday another 9 orders arrived. By Tuesday, when I wrote Craig, I had sold 33 of the 74 items that I had listed. When I received the scanner on the 25th, I had only 21 sales adding up to $400 that month. With the help of ASellerTool, I made a strong finish, ending the month with 54 sales.