Zoomii (A New Format For Online Bookselling)

This is a weblink to a new form of online bookselling. It sells Amazon books on a bookstore map which is very browsable. You can search the covers by subject or browse around the online store. It is very interesting to me. I intend to spend some time looking at the different sections. It looks like pretty much all the selections are new material on popular subjects. It might be useful to use it as a selection tool.

I intend to spend some time writing about it some more tomorrow. I liked the resolution of the covers. I think it will take me a while to get used to the navigation.

The cover search engine is the best feature so far. I like it much better than the storefront. I think it is quite interesting. You put in your keyword, look at the bookcovers, then click on the cover to get a description of the book.

There are a lot of categories of books that are never reviewed and you have to look over the books to buy them. This is especially true of subjects like home improvement, electronics, plumbing, hvac, and other technical books. So, this could be potentially very useful. I may use it to look up these kind of subjects.

http://zoomii.com/#home

Advertising And Sales on This Blog

Advertisment for the 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica


I've had the first time in a while to just look at the news today. Most of it is slightly off putting. I wish they had some more positive news going on in the world.

I went into my storefronts sections and erased all of my commission junction storefronts. They seem to be a waste of time. I got 353 impressions but no sales. I think if this was advertising impressions, I might have made a small amount of money. Straight advertising might work better than attempting to sell things.

The other option is to find some really unique book or book related items to sell.

I still haven't made a single sale from Powells. I am still going to use it as an information source for the books I've read. People are looking at the books list, but not buying a single thing. Again, if it had been advertising, it might have worked better. Sponsorship might work better.

I also went into my Amazon storefront and found no sales. A big $0. So I am not making money on this blog. I have to go back and think about what I am going to do. I will be looking at those wicked places which give ad sponsorship. I might try something different with my reviews. Almost all of the review sites I have looked at have a picture of the book with a link embedded to Amazon. I might join the herd and do this. Most people don't seem to mind this because the picture adds to the review.

I think people will like this blog better with less advertising links. A lot of people hate advertising in blogs.

Maybe, I'll take some time and even look at places like Problogger and John Chow. Scary to think of it. I was reading Problogger a minute ago.

I still haven't gotten the book I have on hold on the business of blogging. Maybe, this is meant to be a personal hobby. I am really enjoying doing this. It has helped me improve my writing tremendously.

I was looking at some marketing blogs and found something fairly entertaining. Marketing Deviant has translated The Art of War into a business poem which is kind of interesting. It follows the same tradition of using classic military books as strategy books for business like Musashi's, The Art of War.

http://marketingdeviant.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/art-of-war-poem-ebook.pdf

I've put in some little Amazon picture boxes of books. Please let me know if this works for you.

Small Scale Online Bookselling, Romantic Science Fiction

For a while when the science fiction bookstore which I helped at closed in Manhattan, I tried small scale bookselling online. I used the various books I had collected mostly signed and unusual science fiction to make some money on ebay and abe. Things like signed paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, or signed hardcovers by Greg Bear. I would first put the items for sale on ebay, then if they didn't sell, I would put them on ABE-- Advanced Book Exchange, http://www.abebooks.com/ . I never found Alibris another booksale exchange to be very appealing. It was a very interesting experience.

I could create both a backlist and front list of titles doing this. However, I found that finding new books was not that easy, unless I chose to put an ad in the paper and take all comers, or was willing to buy entire estate sales worth of books. At the time, I was in Brooklyn, so I didn't have a car. A lot of New Yorkers don't drive.

I learned that bookselling really is very much a labor of love. There is not a huge amount of money in it, unless you sell very high quality rare books, or can sell in very large volumes like the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, or Amazon online.

For me unless the book was very valuable, at least $25 for a book, and ideally abve $50 it seemed like a tremendous effort for very little return. With used books, you have to list every book separately, they don't tend to repeat themselves, unlike new books where you can set up one listing and sell them repeatedly. It requires meticulous care and the promise of quality customer service to very picky customers.

I spent quite a bit of time learning to pack and ship the books. This is really important, surprisingly, it is one of the few things that differentiates online used booksellers is their shipping.

Bookselling online is incredibly easy to get into, almost too easy. I think it is one of the factors that drove many of the used bookstores out of business. It was no longer necessary for the pickers, the people who went out to library booksales, church sales, thrift shops and other places to get old books to bring them in to the bookstore, they could just sell them themselves. This created an incredibly competitive environment. Most of the pickers I've met are older people looking to supplement their income with a hobby.

When you can go to something like the http://www.ioba.org/ -- The Independent Online Booksellers Associations and learn all the basics for free, or http://www.bibliomania.net/ it becomes much too easy to enter the field.

Also, it increases theft from bookstores and libraries. Suddenly, there is a very easy way for people to sell material that is stolen. They can take it and put it online. Please don't buy books with library markings online or from used bookstores, the item you are buying could be stolen. Ask about the stores policy about library books. If they are honest, they will tell you "We don't sell books with library markings." This is a really important policy.

It is amazing the variety and kind of library thieves there are. One of the most common refrains we here is, "I paid my taxes for these books, I should be able to take these books home and keep them."

The concept of returning or borrowing books is unacceptable to many people. We have to keep all the windows locked where we work, or they will go out the window. People mangle the books so they can take them home. Videos and dvds are even harder to keep from being stolen. The most common sign of a book thief is a combination of razor blades and string... No library is immune from this kind of behavior. There are stories of people going around to various libraries around the country and filling whole houses full of stolen books. I've read about this multiple times. This is a nice little article on map thievery, almost as common as book thievery.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2209582,00.html

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Romance books are one of the most read type of books on the market. They account for most of the paperbacks that get printed. Something that is important to know is that mostly women read novels.

A good source for information and reviews on romance books is http://www.romantictimes.com/

One of my favorite cross genre writers is Elizabeth Lowell http://www.elizabethlowell.com/ She writes romantic suspense, historical romances, romances, mysteries, science fiction, and even has a screenplay. She is a best selling author. She wrote one of my favorite books, a science fiction romance called Name of A Shadow which was nominated for the Hugo Award.

Another science fiction writer who wrote a classic romantic science fiction book is Tanith Lee,

The Silver Metal Lover. This was followed up by Metallic Love, a story of near perfect robots who are used as entertainers and escorts who escape their designers in the end.

I am adding Romantic Times to the list of places for book reviews.

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I added a bestselling book widget and a comic book widget from widget bucks. I have also been posting on bumpzee.com and fuelmyblog.com to generate some more interest. The bumpzee widget is very large and cumbersome, I think. If they had something smaller, I might add it to my site.

It is rather interesting who is searching for and looking at my web site. There were two sites which I found rather interesting. One was Plaxo, an online address book site, and another was Zuula, a new metasearch engine.

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I looked through the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2007 and chose two of them to put on hold. The first is Ha Jin A Free Life, the second is Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read -- a truly wonderful title. I do not read every book I reserve. I usually examine the first two chapters, the cover, and the blurb to see if I want to read the book. Not everything is worth reading.