If you sell books online and would like to make a profit, then you want to know about book scouting. Book scouting refers to the process of finding valuable books. This article discusses the basics of book scouting.
Have you had this experience: You buy books in a thrift store based on limited knowledge about the value of books; you come home and go on to the Internet only to find out that those books have little resale value? Then you may need a tool that can help you make a decision before you bring those books home.
One of the things I do to find good books is to use my cell phone to check for book prices. All you need to know is where to find the ISBN code. For those new to book selling, the ISBN code is found on the back cover of the book or on the copyright page.
There are many book scouting services. For starters, I recommend using a low-cost scouting service. Here I list several kinds of book scouting services and give you their website addresses where you can find out more.
The Basics
You can look up the prices on the Internet and see if a book is on demand. To find out the demand for a book you can look up its sales rank on Amazon. The lower the sales rank the better. For example the top bestseller book on Amazon should have a sales rank of 1. Books with a sales rank below 1,000 sell pretty fast on Amazon. I personally look for books that can make me $3 or more and have a sales rank below one million.
Using Your Cell Phone
The best approach is to use your cell phone to check prices and sales rank. If you do not have Internet access on your cell phone, check with your cell phone company about getting it. Once you have Internet access on your phone, you can sign up with a company called ScoutPal. ScoutPal allows you to look up prices and sales rank from Amazon using your cell phone. The subscription cost for using ScoutPal is very low.
Getting Fancier
You can always get a PDA and a scanner for use with ScoutPal or MediaScouter. The advantages of using a PDA is that you can download the book database on your PDA instead of relying on good cell phone signals to find your prices. The downside is that PDAs and scanners can be expensive and the subscription costs for the scouting services can be higher.
I do not suggest you make that investment in the beginning. Using a scanner can draw more attention than you may want. I have read about thrift stores not allowing people that use scanners to buy from them. Besides, thrift stores can realize what you are doing and decide to raise their prices, or worst, they can decide they want to sell books online themselves – some thrift stores already do.
Before signing up for any of the services mentioned above you may want to check other people’s experiences with them on places like the Amazon forums or doing a Web search.
Happy hunting.
