The BookThinker Newsletter ISSN 1547-9501 #119, 21 April 2008

BookThink Announcement Due to the illness of one of BookThink's staff members, the publication of the BookThinker will be temporarily suspended. We anticipate a resumption in two to three weeks. In the interim, special classic issues of the BookThinker consisting of articles that have attracted significant interest over the years will be delivered by email instead. Thank you for your understanding.

From the Editor Important announcements for BookThinker readers.

Making "Non-Books" Work for You How to Turn Color Slides and Negatives into, Uh, Money Something different for you this week. Many, maybe most of us booksellers aren't exclusively booksellers. We also sell ephemera, CDs and more - all easy to do because we often find these items in the same venues we find books in, we're already set up to store and ship them when they sell and, best of all, many are just as profitable as books. For me, photographs have been one of the most productive non-book items I've sold, but for many years I neglected to do anything with them unless they were in the form of actual prints. I'd often pass negatives and slides by altogether or, if I bought them as part of a collection, I didn't even attempt to sell them. No longer. I've since discovered their considerable potential for profit and will show you how I sell them today.

QMR Book of the Week The Sweet Flypaper of Life And here's something else different for you - well, different for website readers of the BookThinker. This week, we're publishing my weekly column, QMR Book of the Week, on the website as well as in the email version. For those of you who aren't aware of it, we feature one book each week that appears in our premium newsletter, BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books. The concept is to offer non-subscribers samples of what appears in these reports and also to add additional depth to some of the recommended titles. If you find this column useful, we invite you to start receiving it by subscribing to the BookThinker.

Gold Edition #49 A Primer on Buying and Selling English Language Dictionaries Next to Bibles, dictionaries are perhaps the most likely book you'll encounter at sales. If you're serious about bookselling, it pays to know what to pick up and what to leave on the table - we could be talking about a difference of hundreds if not thousands of dollars in your annual income. Purchase now.

BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books Issue #4 Issue #4 of BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books is now available for purchase. Purchase or subscribe now.

Previous BookThink Update >>>>>>>

BookThink Update
14 April 2008>>>

Update Announcements

Collecting Science Fiction Exceptions to the Rule The Science Fiction Book Club, Part II First, in Part II of Science Fiction Editor Timothy Doyle's series "Exceptions to the Rule: The Science Fiction Book Club," Tim identifies some higher-dollar SFBC titles that may surprise you - and, just as importantly, explains why they have value.

How to Start a Clicks-and-Bricks Used Bookstore Store Layout Part II: Fixtures Second, Jill Hendrix returns with her outstanding series on starting a bricks-and-clicks bookstore, this time with Part II to her sub-series on store fixtures. Next month we'll publish Part III of both this series and my own series on storage solutions for booksellers.