If you run your business well and focus on constantly growing and relentlessly marketing your inventory, I believe you will reach the point eventually where your success at attaining some of your initial goals will inspire you to begin hatching plans and pipedreams for an even more prosperous future. If you are able to approach this process with a calm and careful mindfulness of what has made you successful up to this point, it can be a wonderful and exciting period. If your path up to this point has been blazed with an entrepreneurial spirit, you will probably find that this next phase is an absolute necessity, lest boredom set in. In any case, if you get to this point, you are certainly well-qualified to be your own guide to the future, and it is also a certainty that you already know and understand the strengths that you have which have made you successful, and perhaps you even understand the weaknesses that you have been able to avoid or overcome so as to avoid failing in this business endeavor.
I, therefore, will gladly settle for an opportunity to take a step back and serve as your business consultant for this next, very intriguing phase of activity. Like many consultants, I will avoid giving much in the way of specific advice and instead will focus on a very general strategic approach, lightly season with a handful of fairly general, if stern, warnings.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Let’s start here by listing three fairly predictable, knee-jerk propositions that often occur to successful online used booksellers when they began to think about the possibilities for expansion:
· expand your business to include a brick-and-mortar used bookshop;
· expand your business and make it scaleable, to use the unfortunate and usually hollow buzzword of the 21st century mega-capitalist, by hiring employees to acquire, list, and ship your books; and
· expand your business by setting up wholesale accounts with publishers and distributors and beginning to list and sell a catalog of new books.
Now, I am not saying that you can’t succeed at any of these propositions. Probably you can. I simply want to ask yourself two very basic questions before you dive into any of these ideas:
· First, given the fact that each of these propositions requires a significant ongoing expenditure of cash, are you truly prepared for the introduction of these new stresses on your business and on your life?
· Second, if you take on these stresses, commit yourself to the ongoing expenditures, and succeed, what will you really have gained?
Lest you think that I am throwing rhetorical questions into your path out of some perverse desire to obstruct you, let me assure you that I would not do that. I will try to get more concrete.
Let’s start by backing up and taking a look at the business model presented in this book, a business model at which you have presumably been successful.
· You began a successful business with an initial capital expenditure of less than $500 and ongoing expenses that came easily out of ongoing revenues without cutting seriously into profits.
· You’ve made no expensive ongoing commitments to employees, landlords, publishers, or distributors, so that -- at least in this particular business venture -- you have never had to worry about laying people off, failing to make payroll, failing to pay employer trust fund taxes, failing to make rent or accounts payable payments on time, being sued, filing for bankruptcy, having to box up returns, fielding telephone calls from creditors, having your assets attached, etc. Maybe you catch my drift.
Well, there is no point in beating a dead horse. If you succeed at adding the kind of expansion propositions we have been discussing here, I submit to you that you will have succeeded at re-inventing your business by going from new economy to old economy and saddling yourself with the need to supervise and pay a staff of employees, the need to show up for work each day somewhere other than the garage, basement, or extra bedroom (you’ll need a little starch in the bathrobe), and the need to organize an accounts payable department and divert a serious and regular flow of cash through it to other entities which do not participate in buying your family’s groceries or making the payments on your Lexus sport ute.
All the while, you will find that the quick-on-your-feet, fast-eat-the-slow capacity to tune in to, anticipate, and adapt to market changes will be lost or serious undercut by these new drains on your time, imagination, intellect, creativity, and energy. There are plenty of people reading this paragraph for whom imagination, intellect, creativity, and energy are the assets that give them competitive edge that makes them successful. But I believe those among you who will be most successful are those who are most mindful of these specific assets and who are most attentive to the need to protect their imagination, intellect, creativity, and energy from being overwhelmed by the drudgery and doom that might well result from the expansion ideas we have been discussing.
Okay. Enough of that. So, then, what kinds of ideas make good sense as ways to keep those entrepreneurial fires burning and to expand your business?
To begin with, it never hurts to look for new products, new markets, new customers, and new revenue that builds upon the things you already do and do well, or anticipates the products, markets, and customers that are right around the corner.
· Affiliate fees. If you have developed a website or if you regularly send out email to your customers, you may be able to build upon product suggestions or search links to Amazon or other e-commerce sites that will enable you to harvest affiliate-fee revenue through programs such as Amazon Associates or the kind of multi-affiliate program offered at Be Free ( www.befree.com). Naturally a primary consideration with this kind of approach is the need to avoid “spamming” your customers with unsolicited commercial email. Customers are glad to have a confirmation email from you, and probably won’t mind an additional layer of book-related marketing information as long as it does not get in the way of the information they need to glean from the confirmation email, and as long as it includes a simple and user-friendly “remove” disclaimer at the end so that recipients will not be alarmed that your message is the first of one of those major, relentless spamming campaigns that we never seem to be able to turn off!
· Mine the potential for repeat customers. It is (or should be) understood that the vast majority of online buyers experience your business as an adjunct of Amazon.com or Alibris or Half.com or Advanced Book exchange, and will have “primary loyalty”, if loyalty it is, to that larger entity. Nonetheless, as you operate your business over months and then years you are developing a valuable list of proven book buyers. Sending multiple commercial email messages to these customers is spam and you should not do it, but if sending one order confirmation gives you one or two free shots at these buyers, you may want to consider how you can most appropriately invite these folks to take advantage of special services you may provide such as free (or refunded) shipping on all repeat orders over $15, universal title search and fulfillment, a “build a library” service who are looking to collect a full set of Ludlum first editions or a representative library on a particular topic or even an incomplete set of two dozen or so Sweet Valley High page-turners. Along similar lines, we have found at Windwalker Books that roughly 5 per cent of all our sales are to “international customers,” and these buyers seem especially responsive to our offers to help them avoid exorbitant global shipping costs by allowing them to come back with direct bulk orders.
· Sidelines. Sidelines involving music, software, videos, cards, artwork, magazines or magazine subscriptions, or other naturally complementary products often work well in brick-and-mortar stores, but each of these presents special problems for the online bookseller. While one can usually judge the condition of a used book in about ten seconds by eyeballing it inside and out, the same is not true for a used videocassette, DVD, CD, or CD-ROM.
· Anticipating Best Sellers. There’s a certain category of books that can bring you regular sales and good profits, and all you have to do is see it coming and find the cheap copies while they are still cheap. At this writing, two of the best examples are Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity and Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. In each case, they have been hyper-common in the past (to use the terminology of Chapter VI), with very good trade paperback editions selling online for well under a dollar each after having been phenomenally successful best sellers. They are, right now, the subject of films with very high-powered marketing campaigns in national print and television media, and they are flying off the shelves. If you had been aware six weeks ago that this would happen you could have purchased dozens of copies of each very cheaply, and you would be able to sell them very easily now for six to ten dollars each. The trick, obviously, is to anticipate these trends by availing yourself of the same information that is available – through the publishing and distribution industries -- to book buyers for new bookstores. You should be able to source this information yourself by conducting an online search of marketing information available from the major publishers such as Random House (with its atRandom newsletter), the large distributors such as Baker & Taylor, Koen Books, and Ingram, and trade publications such as Publisher’s Weekly (which is very expensive, but carried by most public libraries). Frequently you will also find that, even after the demand for such a title has ramped up significantly and prices on Amazon’s marketplace have risen accordingly, there are still plenty of inexpensive copies available at Half.com.
If you do decide to try out a new venture or idea, you may want to consider making it into a kind of “pilot project” at first with a different screen name or storefront so that the valuable online presence and reputation you have established with years of hard work is not trashed and tarnished overnight by unforeseen negative consequences of a new project.
Polish the Pearl
If the kinds of “new ideas” presented here have not really rung your bell, yet you also have not come up with anything you liked better, then perhaps we have accomplished our real purpose here in a backward kind of way. What I am getting at is the sense that our real mission ought to be simply to keep getting better and better as online booksellers. Polish the pearl, as oysters are wont to exhort one another down in the murky land of Spongebob Squarepants. I would hazard a guess that there are good ideas in this book that you have yet to try, and that will be even more true when the next edition comes along in a couple years or perhaps sooner. Try them. Hatch your own ideas, and try them. Get better. Be the best bookseller you can be.
Then, if you are indeed truly bored, maybe it is time to see if you can sell your business or pass it on to a friend or relative, and start something new. Try your hand at writing a book on the subject. Is this just a tongue-in-cheek suggestion? Not entirely. There is certainly room for more than one book on the subject, and I would rather see them be written by people who have walked the walk rather than those whose only skill involves talking the talk. If you don’t have the desire to write such a book yourself, but you do have some ideas about how this one could be made better, I hope you will take the step of sending me an email at Windwalker@nativeweb.net. I promise that I will read it and try to use your thoughts to help make the next edition better so that the noble profession of bookselling, about which I rhapsodized much earlier in this book, will be even better served by the nouveau profession of online bookselling. Thank you. You are free to go and sell books. And I am free to return to my own first love, books and bookselling, for which my passion only grows stronger.
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