The Book of the Day Club

Now that I’m a publisher, I can actually fulfill an idea I had years ago: use my knowledge of typesetting and layout to produce sellable information at a very low cost. Not only am I producing self-help material based on my research and experience, I’m getting out Literature that’s in the Public Domain! I can bang out a well-edited book, complete with cover art, in about two hours. That includes listing it on eBay!
         Current titles include THE ART OF WAR, THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY, DRACULA and A STUDY IN SCARLET, the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure. I’m already working on a list of authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Jane Austen to start (in no particular order), along with more by Bram Stoker and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
         Any suggestions are welcome as to classics you’d like to see made available as finely wrought .PDF files. Yeah, I forgot – FANNY HILL is on the to-do list, too~!

TGIJ

January is normally the slowest month for retail sales. Thank God! Ironing out the kinks of a newly created anything is tough. Ironing out the kinks of this new store is especially taxing, since the combination of slow download/upload speed, even slower PC performance, entirely new area of eBay I’m unfamiliar with, new interface rules to remember, etc., means I have little time to spend on customer service.
         Yes, I’ve made a couple of sales. The first was to a total newbie, from Italy, no less – first purchase, no feedback. The second alerted me to a major goof-up in my instructions for downloading eBooks, which meant revising all my listings to give the RIGHT instructions for downloading my files.
         Now I’m off to the bank to open another account for PayPal micropayments on sales of less than $12 US. I’m sure there are more headaches ahead, but I’m looking forward to the eventual automation of so much that I am doing by hand – and foot!

Escape velocity

It’s amazing how fast things are proceeding, now that my overload of information has “jelled” in my mind. I’m rolling out with listings that seem to have been good sellers for others. I also add on value with my own contributions, such as typesetting (I knew that printing business knowledge would eventually pay off), image creation, sales copy writing, etc.
     Here’s the real hoot: due to the way eBay Store Manager calculates your inventory, my dozen plus listings (with 10,000 of each item available) is now valued at over $200,000 US! My markup at retail (the percentage of the selling price that’s above my cost of buying) is over 99%!
     Life is good and keeps getting better.

The mixed blessing of an inheritance.

I’m receiving my inheritance in batches – the stereo and hundreds of records and cassettes my wife (and I) bought. It’s a cumbersome mess, and I’ve only gotten the first batch. Two more batches are on the way. While I really love music, moving this much stuff without a couple of roadies and a truck is miserable.
         The good part of it is the inventory itself. I was looking for a product source to sell that would allow me to pay-as-I-go and learn. Here it is, in my new warehouse/house, with more coming. I’m already boning up on how eBay buyers want a record listed, what pictures are important, did the seller provide a song list, etc.
         I’ve also got my business partner, none other than the USPS, delivering a batch of 25 boxes appropriate for shipping albums. Free boxes, free shipping. I have no shame saying I work with the Government!
         Persistence is paying off.

Where's the beef?

The late Sarah Peller, (in)famous for the line in the title, nailed it. When you want something of substance, you ask for it.

I just posted a blog entry over at eBay - you'll probably see it in my eBay blog links on the left. In it, I was asking for feedback (but avoid using that word in eBay blogs - you get a lot of comments about EBAY feedback, which is a touchy subject to many) on two listings I am testing through Sunday.

The silence was deafening. IMNSHO, most bloggers over there are social animals, beggars for bids or compleat lunatics. The notion that I would ask a marketing question to a bunch of marketers and buyers and get NOTHING is telling.

Perhaps postcards2go will notice and respond to that and this.

[Sigh]

Growing by leaps, bounds and short hops - not necessarily in that order.

Hit several landmarks today. In eBay:
•Made the Top 5,000 Reviewers - funny, that makes the little icon thingie smaller. How about the top 000,000,005,000?
•Got my new feedback "star". I am unsullied, at this point. No negatives.

From eBay:
•Found a self-financing business strategy which I had posited MUST exist. Replies from the Universe can be swift and apposite.
•Got some more eBooks with resale rights that actually appear resellable. Found others that showed me what NOT to do in terms of listing, re-branding, etc.
•Met a crazy guy from the Netherlands that practically fell all over himself to oblige me, customer service-wise. See post below this one.

The biggest leap forward is the change in type and kind of attention I've been getting, both here and in other venues. At first, it was friends and family. Now it's those who are new to me, curious, a little wary and much more experienced in dealing with open online environments. Most of my online experience was in static domains, where I was a big fish in a small pond. Here, one needs to be more circumspect and definitely less arrogant than I am accustomed to. I may have a lot to be arrogant about, but myriads upon myriads here trump me!

Hmm, maybe the humility thing is the biggest leap. Nah, I'll tackle that tomorrow!

A customer service tale.

It's nice when you get more than you paid for. It's even better if you find an "aha" moment, and connect with someone. I was poking around eBay in the eBook category, and found a listing for 9 recipes for 1 cent. I duly made my purchase, only to find that the "eBook" was actually a list of links to the seller's Guides for recipes. I was a bit taken aback, then intrigued. This seller had just monetized his Guides. See my post below, "2007 - I'm ready".

After a bit of messaging back and forth, the seller gave me a 99 cent refund! That's 98 more penny eBooks I can buy! I also contacted eBay about the listing, wondering if it's okay to auction off your own Guide. The thought never occurred to me. I hope he PUTS THOSE GUIDES BACK UP, PRONTO! The Guides weren't any kind of violation.

It turns out the seller is a young guy in the Netherlands, who is addicted to eBay, generally buys and has a Chinese eBay store. I don't think he's Chinese - offering an eBay store in Chinese is free for a year! Plus, he's a bit NUTS! I like him a lot. Anybody who has an animated .GIF of Einstein can't be all bad!

If it turns out that auctioning off your own Guides is legitimate, I may have found a self-funding income stream. I just won't call them eBooks. That's neither here nor there, really.

The real value of this whole experience is the connection. The world really is flat.

You have to start somewhere - here will do!

Greetings,
After struggling for a while in a 1.0 Web world, I've pushed myself to create a Web 2.0 life. I'm currently on eBay as vincerunza53 (not a total newb, but still suffering from information overload). You are, most likely, friends, family and/or eBayer.
     In the near future, I'll be expanding into more markets (there, I've said it - I'm in marketing for myself), and will be looking for opportunities to create a vast empire that will rule the world...oh, wait, my sister's got that covered. She just got a job at Google, working the hardware end of things. I'll just stick to marketing. :P