Slowing Book Sales Sadden Me

I finally had a book sell online yesterday. It has been weeks since I have had a sale. I have heard through NPR that book sales are down at all bookstores, and let me tell you, they really are. I have noticed a drastic difference between now and just a few months ago. I used to have a couple sales a week, now I have a sale every couple weeks!

And I miss them. It isn't just the money, which is nice, but I sold this last book for under $3, so we aren't talking about a lot of scratch here. What I really miss is the little bumps to my getting nine hundred meter over there on the right side of the blog. I didn't realize how much I liked those little reinforcements that I was working on bringing more income; each time I updated that meter, even if it was just a few dollars, really felt good. It made me feel productive. Those sales were like little pats on the back...

There isn't much I can do about it. I could lower prices, I suppose, but many of my prices are as low as I can go and frankly, if people aren't buying books at all, it really doesn't matter how cheap you offer them. The only thing I can do is continue to ride it out, keep adding to my inventory and hope that as the economy gets better the sales will improve.

I recently got from friends a few more boxes of books to sell. Even though my sales are down, I keep putting them online. I've been trying to list the Nonfiction books first, those seem to sell the best, although my other top sellers are Science Fiction and Self Help books. (Boy, it seems like there should be a joke in there somewhere, doesn't it?) I also have a big box of books that I just can't sell online - mostly mass market paperbacks of really popular authors - Mary Higgins Clark, for example. Those books don't sell, there are just too many copies out there and when you go to Amazon you can find hundreds of copies for a penny. I can't compete with that! Instead, I plan on offering them at my garage sale for $.25 - $.50, since I will actually make more that way.

In the meantime I will miss those positive reinforcements. I'd love to see somethings sell, if only from that standpoint. Ah well...

What about you? How is your sideline businesses going?


Photo by: Gret@Lorenz.