The BookThinker Newsletter ISSN 1547-9501 126, 27 July 2008

BookThink Update
11 August 2008>>>

Update Announcements

BookThink's Top 10 on eBay June 2008 Fortune favored the UK and France in June. Sellers from the two countries made a strong showing, garnering 4 spots in the fiction top 10 and 5 in the non-fiction group. One UK seller did especially well, selling 2 James Bond novels. It was a good month for books published during or after 1950. In fact, the #1 fiction work dated from 2008. The book Devil May Care, in the Penguin Bentley Bond series, gave the sleuth 3 appearances on the list. Will July bring more European Union countries to the top 10?

QMR Book of the Week Five Simple Steps to Perfect Golf If you're a golfer (or know one), you doubtless understand that golfers are forever looking for "the secret" - some technique or other that will, once and for all, cure what's amiss with their games. Present them with a "forgotten" - rather, "suppressed" method that legend maintains was astonishingly successful back in the day, and intrigue begins. Count Yogi promised this and more, but apparently the road to acceptance among his peers was paved with discrimination.

Gold Edition Quotation of the Week How to Become a Full-Time Bookseller Issue #23 How many full-time booksellers do you know? I don't know many, and I know a lot of booksellers. However, I know a lot of part-time booksellers who talk and talk about doing it full-time. Someday. For some reason not many of them ever make the transition.

Gold Edition #52 How To Use Publisher's Back Lists for Arbitrage Part III: Case Study #3 In this issue I'll examine a third publisher that provides numerous opportunities for arbitrage, but before I get started you'll notice that we included an attached file - TFHpublications.xls. This is an Excel spreadsheet compiled by bookseller Dave Robinson consisting of Tropical Fish Hobbyist publications that have potential for good resale value. In Part I of this series, you may recall, I cited 12 TFH dog titles that I'd recently sold for between $30 and $50. Dave's list presents 104 TFH titles (including birds, cats, dogs, fish, etc.) that range in listed price from $15 to $235.95. This list can, of course, be uploaded to your PDA or printed for insertion into your scouting book. Our thanks go out to Dave for both providing this very useful list and demonstrating how booksellers can piggyback off these newsletters, expand the illustrative information contained in them exponentially, and convert it to a format that can be used to great advantage in the field. Purchase now.

BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books Issue #5 Issue #5 of BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books is now available for purchase. Purchase or subscribe now.

From the Editor It starts and stops with "From the Editor" today, and the topic is change. Effectively immediately, the free BookThinker weekly newsletter will return to its original twice-monthly format. The plan is to publish one regular BookThinker per month along with a monthly update presenting Pamela Palmer's "Top 10 on eBay," a few sneak previews of premium content, and likely some miscellaneous content. The BookThinker itself will feature expanded content - perhaps four to six feature articles instead of the present one or two. Another way to put this is that we'll be publishing essentially the same quality and quantity of content that we have been; it will just be distributed differently. Read more here.

Previous BookThink Update >>>>>>>

BookThink Update
21 July 2008>>>

Update Announcements

The Blind Men and the Elephant An Interview with Nebraska Book Company Last week I spoke with Barry Major, Chief Operating Officer of Nebraska Book Company, and Nate Rempe, Vice President of Internet Strategy. We discussed many of the problems that booksellers have been reporting on book forums during the past months. Read the interview here.

Selling on Amazon Who's Afraid of Nebraska Books? If you have even glanced at the Amazon forums over the last month and a half, you've seen this name everywhere. Never have there been so many threads focusing on this one book company: Nebraska Books. Never has there been such mass hysteria and screams of "Don't sell to them!" "Cancel! Cancel!" which brings to mind "The sky is falling!" And yet Nebraska Books (aka Tyson Motsinger as buyer) has been a valued customer of mine. I have completed several dozen solid transactions with them. They are my best repeat customer. Read more here.