When It Makes Sense to List
Lower-Dollar Books

For all the preaching we do at BookThink urging you to sell higher-dollar, collectible books, it's easy to forget that there are occasions when selling lower-dollar books makes sense - in fact, I can think of three good reasons to, starting with ...

Specialty Books

If you're a specialist bookseller or a generalist bookseller who specializes to some extent in one or more niches, there's good reason to add lower-dollar books to your inventory, especially, if they are "must-have" titles for collectors of those niches. Why? Because collectors often purchase multiple titles from specialists - in fact, seek out those booksellers with a broader range of titles - and will be more likely to pull the trigger first on a lower-dollar book, which in turn can stimulate purchases of higher-dollar books.

An example would be an AA collector who most definitely needs this bibliography:

It's fairly cheap if you need one:

Bread and Butter Books

By this I mean books that you not only come across frequently in the field but also sell quickly. These could be, say, locally published books that aren't often found outside of your local scouting area or could simply be books that are very common generally but also generally sought after. If you sell titles more than once, of course, you will have a description already prepared and need only snap a photo or two and perhaps edit the condition notes to list them - an efficient process that eliminates the need to build much labor into things.

An example of a generally common book that sells quickly:

Hot Commodity Books

It made me cringe some to type the word "commodity" in the context of recommending books to sell, but newer books with ISBN's typically require little effort to list because those very ISBN's can be typed in to generate field auto-fills in many listing templates, and listing a book like this can often be done in seconds. Again, minimal labor. If the book also has a very strong sales ranking, it will sell in a matter of hours or days, and there will be little labor involved in maintaining it in inventory, and fees will be minimized as well.

Virtually any edition of this: