Juxtabook

Special edition paperbacks

When a series of books becomes very popular there is often an urge on the part of publishers to cash in on this and sell even more copies of the titles by producing several versions. The Harry Potter series famously had adult friendly versions of the cover as well as the standard one for example. Such special editions may only by available for a limited period. When new, discounted from a supermarket or Amazon could they possibly be an investment?

Well, I wouldn't recommend buying any book simply for investment; the market is so hard to predict and frequently baffles me despite ten years in the trade now. If the series is popular even a time limited edition will still sell in large numbers and may not be worth the paper they're printed on in five years. There is however a small window. This is after the special edition finished being available new and before its devotees get fed up, move on to the next thing, and flood the market with unwanted copies. During this window (which might be months, or might be a decade) there will likely be shortage of supply which probably would not make your fortune but might make you a tiny profit on the price when you bought it new.

An example: I'd love to claim credit for this, I am a bookdealer after all, but this was entirely accidental. Anyway, I bought myself the four Twilight books last year. When ordering I happened to order the special edition with the red pages for one of the four. It was the same price as as the standard copy which is why I did not notice. When they arrived I just thought Eclipse happened to have been published that way. I read the book (ok, three times, it is that kind of book) and then my husband started to read the series. He was half way through Eclipse when I noticed on a used bookselling site that red edged editions where not standard and were selling at a small premium. A quick glance at Amazon told me that they were no longer for sale new. I photographed my well thumbed copy, gave a downbeat and honest description and popped for sale online. By lunch time I had been paid five times what I had paid for it new. I had to email Mr J at work and tell him if he wanted to finish Eclipse that evening he'd better ask one of the kids he teaches if he could borrow a copy as I had sold his.

Now this happened about last October (2009). So what has happened to price of those red edged volumes in the meantime? Well on Amazon at least the price has risen slightly again on what I charged for my copy last year. Now I did price mine to sell and of course by definition if a book is being offered for sale at a particular price it hasn't actually sold at that price and may never do so. However given the speed at which I sold my battered-and-honestly-described-as-such copy (less than three hours) I suspect these prices are at least close to attainable.

All this is particularly interesting because another special edition of the Twilight books is coming out. It will be, wait for it, white! Not black. Anyway Twihards may well be beside themselves with anxiety for these new copies. Or maybe not. The key thing is that these copies are not being sold in the USA which leaves a very large market starved of copies. A window of opportunity for the free world wide delivery of the Book Depository. But what of the idle speculator? Will you make a few quid pre-ordering these, waiting till they're no longer sold and trying to sell them on? I really have no idea. The choice is yours!

 

Wading through online catalogues is murder when searching for Twilight items as there are so many versions. So here are the direct links for ...

Amazon UK

Twilight

New Moon

Eclipse

Breaking Dawn

Non-UK residents might like The Book Depository with free world wide delivery:

Twilight

New Moon

Eclipse

Breaking Dawn

Books Sales online or where to buy both new and used books

There has been a good deal of comment on recent goings on in the world of online book selling. I won't rehearse the arguments here but it you are interested then my colleague Jane made an excellent post on the subject on her blog, so excellent it was picked up by The Guardian as one of their Best of the Web items this week. You can read it here. She followed it up with this, which also makes interesting reading. The Scotsman also cover the story but from the perspective of new booksellers, and you can read that here.

So if you are looking for indie friendly alternatives to buy from online then here are a few:

For new books:

The Book Depository with its free world wide delivery is always a favourite.

Play.com sell new books plus some used books. They also sell games, gadgets, DVDs and such like.

For used, rare and out -of -print books:

ibooknet is a co-operative of British and Irish sellers of used books. The order process is a bit long winded but all the sellers contact details are available so you can fire off an email or telephone.

ukbookworld is only for books over £4 but this does mean that if you put in a keyword like Bronte you get decent editions and serious literary criticism or biography not pages and pages of tatty paperbacks of their novels. Like Ibooknet you can easily access the booksellers details to pay by phone or ask a question.

On the continent there is the excellent Antiqbook based in the Netherlands with a UK interface and also Choosebooks and Bibliophile.

In North America there is Biblio who again make bookseller's details available and have a very fair commission structure which rewards the best behaved sellers.

Ebay needs little introduction in its various incarnations, and has both auction and shop style books for purchase.

Ebid, like Ebay has various national sites and this link lets you pick the nation closest to you via the drop down box at the top right. Ebid has both shops and auctions and is actually quite good for inexpensive fiction paperback and children's paperbacks.

Booksellers own websites: if you like the service a bookseller gives you google their name and see if they have their own website. Some booksellers include promotional material with a book but as many of the best know selling sites forbid this then your excellent knowledgeable seller might be too intimidated to let you know they have their own site. So have a look!

I hope the above is useful. It may save you from having to shop at the Other Place or its very many subsidiaries.

Edited to add: thank you for all the support on and offline. A few more links for you supplied by readers:

GreenMetropolis is an excellent venue for selling your own books within the UK with a clear and fair fee structure. They're also, hurrah, a site that recognises that some books cost more to post than others. 5p from each sale goes to the Woodland Trust. However they're not as cheap as buying from booksellers' own sites or from Ebid for cheap paperbacks, but they're still very reasonable.

Indiebound helps you find your independent used bookshop with in the USA

Quidco is a cashback co-operative. There's a five pound fee but only if you earn at least five pounds and you can get cashback for books, dvds etc bought from play.com and Waterstones if you click through from your Quidco members page.

Lastly someone pointed out that LOVEFiLM also sells films as well as rents them.

On the perils of working from home

We (that's 3 of us plus several thousand books and a hamster called Rocket) live in a Victorian terraced house. It has a very small hall just the width of the front door. Through this hall come visitors, deliveries, books and us. It can be a squeeze especially as logistics mean the in-coming books must go up to the study to be processed into stock before going down two flights to the book room where they are stored till sold. The hall can be a bit of a bottle neck therefore as books arrive and await processing. This morning I had just cleared it so some furniture could be delivered when five boxes of books arrived for me to purchase from a regular customer.

The hall was now blocked again.

So I heaved the boxes into the sitting room. Having got them there I decided I had better unpack them. What a delight. The customer who has sent the book is a customer of many years standing, who knows what I buy and just sends potential stock without telling me what it is going to be. It is almost always very good recently out of print literary criticism and the arrival of these boxes is a bit like bookseller's Christmas, being a total surprise and often a great pleasure.

In the end I was well satisfied with the lugging about as this is what was inside (they're stacked 3-5 deep):

They're not technically speaking in stock quite yet as I haven't paid for them, but they will be soon and will be catalogued and on the website in 2-3 weeks.

The dratted furniture delivery still hasn't arrived but I had a fun morning.

Picture Slide

I have just discovered this slide widget on the website of Tall Story Books. I thought I'd share it as I know the booksellers among you might find it useful for your websites. You could use it for showcasing craft, or art or anything. It was the work of a moment to pop a few book images into it.

Book Business Notes

Postage arrangements during UK Royal Mail postal strikes

In order to allow as many customers as possible to get their books without delay we are making the following offers:

UK customers:

1. spend more than £40 on a single item and opt for second class postage. We will upgrade to special delivery at no further cost to you. This will avoid your item being snarled up in any back log.

or

2. spend more than £40 on multiple items and opt for second class postage and we will charge you postage for just one item and send by either a Royal Mail trackable service or suitable alternative which will again avoid your item being snarled up in any backlog.

or

3. you can opt to pay for special delivery for any item that doesn't fit in the above catagories. This option is available through the checkout.

International customers:

1. Spend more than £40 on a single item and opt for airmail postage and we will send by airsure (a faster trackable airmail service)

or

2. Spend more than £40 on mulitple items and opt for airmail postage and we will send by a trackable non-Royal Mail service.

Being a small family business we're not big enough to justify accounts with carriers other than Royal Mail but we will do our best to minimise delays for customers.

You can view our stock here.

Book Sale

Tripping over uncatalogued boxes of books in the book room this morning has determined that the long over due sale that I have been promising myself will now be happening! I have reduced all prices on my own website by 20% and I will keep them like that till the end of June. I am also offering all followers of Juxtabook on the blog or twitter an extra 5%. The 20% reduced price is what you see (for June) on the site, then if you buy anything either put the code jux0609k in the relevant box when you go through the checkout, or tell me (or my husband) when you ring or email, to get the extra discount.

We don't stock much fiction but there is a little. Along side the purely academic literary criticism we have a lot of literary biography, some poetry, some history, some drama, some art history, and a small amount of collectable items. There is an advanced search page or you can browse by category.

Book Buying Survey

Chatting with fellow booksellers Jane and Jackie in the comments to the last post has made me think about the dominance of Amazon and Ebay. I was wondering to what extent most readers used the less well known bookselling websites. I attempted to create a poll but realised that I need a 'survey' in order for you to be able to check more than one choice at once. Surveys fit less well onto blogs! The link to open the survey is on the left there and appears in a pop-up I'm afraid. It is just one question and takes all of 30 seconds to complete, even allowing for you to take a couple of swigs of coffee whilst you contemplate your answer. It doesn't show the results as you vote but I will give you the summary next weekend. If you have an RSS reader you can subscribe to the results of this survey by RSS. Simply copy the link below into your RSS reader.

http://polldaddy.com/surveyRSS.aspx?id=FF7B04D647DA6168

Thank you!

(...and if anyone can recommend a better way of presenting a question to which multiple answers are permitted I would be grateful if you'd let me know!)

Edited to add...

If you can't get the link in the side bar to work to get to the survey question then please try this:

http://www.polldaddy.com/s/FF7B04D647DA6168/

Out and About

In book selling guise at Bedale Bookfair. It is nice to get out from behind the pc and meet the customers. If I look a bit vacant it was the 5.30am start. I am not a morning person.

Time Saved Typing

Although I am popping this little software review in the book selling category it would probably of interest to anyone who does a lot of typing. I suffer from Repetitive Strain Injury, in both arms, and so for me, working all day on a keyword, this little gizmo is vital.

It is actually two gizmos: type-it-in and paste-it-in both by Wavget and were recommended to me by Philip Lund of Lund Theological Books. Available on a 30 day trial I defy anyone not to give in and purchase for the grand sum of about £10 for each program.

Type-it-in is a little box of buttons that floats on your desktop. you can move it about or it goes transparent when not in use, or you can just close it temporarily so it is never annoying. You categories the buttons into groups. So I have orders, addresses, cataloguing etc. In orders I have created little buttons for each standard paragraph I might need: how to pay for the UK, how to pay from abroad, you book has been dispatched, etc. Emails to customers can be written in just a couple of clicks, customised where necessary. Similarly my addresses group has buttons for the individual lines of my address so I can quickly fill online forms in properly and without typing errors that might be fatal in an address if you want your parcel of books to arrive.

With type-it-in you can also create a keyboard short cut so you hit three pre-selected keys and type-it-in types your paragraph out for you even if it is not visible on the screen. My mother who transcribes a lot of documents finds it useful for storing repetitive phrases, place names, legal phrases and such like so that they can quickly entered without typing the full word. You could do the same for author or critics or other key names for essays (the times I typed 'reader-response theory' during my MA doesn't bear thinking about), or indeed for blog posts! 

You can even store passwords on type-it-in and then protect the lot with one password. But be warned if you lose your type-it-in password you'd lose the lot.

Paste-it-in is a clipboard but unlike some of the clipboards that come with programs you might already have it works with all other software you are likely to come across, not just its stable mates. You set the number of buttons you want and you can copy data in order. So line by line of a customer's address ready to click it into to your invoicing program, or your address label printouts. It also makes for fast listing on ebay as you copy field by field the data you need from your book-cataloguing program and then just pop it onto the ebay listing form. Text saved on paste-it-in remains there even after you turn the computer off which is useful, and it also looses the formatting so that it automatically pastes to match the document into which you paste.

I first acquired them when running Windows XP but my pc died last summer and I switched to Vista. Type-it-in was backed up and I just uploaded it to my vista pc, dropped an email to Paul at Wavget, and got a new key to unlock it, no problem. It works beautifully on XP and fine on Vista though it sometimes forgets to 'float'  but it is easily found again.

As well as saving my painful arms the combined time saving of these two little programs has massively increased my productivity from cataloguing to fulfilling orders and I wouldn't be without either of them. I have discovered quite a few work-arounds for RSI and will share more in future posts.