Today Amazon is the largest e-commerce website with an endless line of products in their stock. There is almost nothing that you wouldn’t be able to shop from amazon. While some of those products are sold in large numbers, some make just a normalised quantity of selling but that is depending upon the kind of product and the demand it has among customers.
Books are among the top sold products on Amazon. The stats are increasing daily with the increase in the number of readers and books. In 2019, the average annual expenditure on books per consumer unit in the U.S. was $25.42.
In this article we’ll be talking about how you sell books on Amazon and make money through it.
Book Sales
When it comes to online book selling, Amazon has absolutely no competition. Approximately 28 million books were sold in 2018 just in India. A total of 675 million print books were sold in just the U.S. last year. The figures are much higher on the global level.
Books sold on Amazon include not just the print edition but also the ebooks and audiobooks which have gained fair attraction in recent years. These formats have increased the revenue by a higher percentage.
Almost 50 percent of total book sales and 83 percent of total ebook sales in the US is carried out by Amazon. More than 74% of the adults consume at least 1 book in a year. India is the country with the highest record time for reading i.e. 10 hours per week followed by Thailand and China.
With its self publishing feature of Amazon, the largest retailer has also backed many new authors discouraged by the lack of popularity and the high priced book publishing process. This has resulted in a great number of bestsellers and a source of motivation for many to come.
How to sell books and make money on Amazon?
The best thing about this is that the process is direct. You can easily understand the procedure to make money by selling books on Amazon.
- Sourcing Method
First of all, you need to choose the means to source the books. You can do this either by ‘Scanning method’ if you have time to scan each book, ‘Wholesaling method’ if you enjoy making deals or ‘ Retail arbitrage’ in case you can get books at a suitable price from someone else.
- Creating Seller Account
The next step of this process will be to create your seller account on Amazon.
For selling old books one should sign up for an Individual seller account.
For selling new books one should sign up for a Professional seller account.
Upto 35 books can be sold on an Individual account without paying any fee. For selling more than 35 books, you’ll need a professional seller account with a monthly payment of $39..99.
Further you can decide the market where you want to sell your books which you can change later on accordingly.
After this you will need to choose how exactly you want to fulfill your orders. You will have to choose from the two options below:
- Fulfilled by Amazon – Choosing this option will be helpful to you as everything from packing and shipping of the order you receive will be done by Amazon itself. You just have to pay the additional fee for that and send the product to their centers. This is best for those who are new to this.
- Fulfilled by Merchant – If you choose this, you will have to do all the packing and shipping by yourself. If you have a good connection to courier services and have ample of time, this may work well for you.
- Listing the products
Now that you are done with the initial process, you can list the books for sale. For this you will just need to enter an ISBN number and select one from the results that come up.
It won’t be necessary to do this for all the books as many might already be listed. Once you have got the book, go to the listing and click on ‘Sell on Amazon’. You’ll be asked to fill in some information about that particular book like the price, condition and number of copies you want to sell in the form that appears on the screen.
In case your book is not listed, you can create one by clicking good pictures and writing an attractive description and then clicking on Save and Finish.
Lowering the price of the book comparatively with the other sellers increases the chances of hike in sales, if you are fairly new to this. Even if you are not, lower prices and positive reviews will increase your sales.
Amazon provides a total of five options for the condition of the book you are selling.
- New – Packed, unopened, unused new books come under this category.
- Used: Almost New – Lacking the original packaging but still unopened, unused books with no wear and tear will be found under this category.
- Used: Very Good condition – Books that are used but without any damage and well kept will be directed under this category.
- Used: Good condition – Books that are constantly used with markings but still managed to be kept in fair condition as well as adhering to the guidelines of Amazon for Category specific condition will come under this section.
- Used: Acceptable – Worn out books with markings and scratches all over it but still in a condition that is acceptable to the customers comes under this category.
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
ISBN is a 13 digit unique numeric commercial book identifier number. This can generally be found on the back cover next to the barcode. It may also be given to with the copyright details of the book.
Each separate edition and variant of a publication will have a different ISBN. The hardcover, paperback and ebook editions of the same book will have different ISBN.
The feature is helpful for selling books on Amazon as whenever you list your book, it shows the list of editions of that book that is up for sale and you can accordingly set the price.
Managing your sales
Once you have listed your products for sale, you can start managing it from the Amazon inventory where you will be able to do whatever alterations you wish to have in your products for sale.
One should start looking for an inventory and book sales around them.The inventory is not at all complex to work with so you’ll easily get adapted to it.
Shipment of the Products
Three types of delivery options are offered by Amazon.
- Standard – Under this, delivery will be done in 3-5 days.
- Expected– This takes time just as the name suggests. Delivery will be within 1 day.
- International – Since, the product will have to travel outside international borders, delivery might take 3-35 days.
Amazon has a fixed price set for shipping charges. And Amazon gives $ 3.99 as credit for delivery. So, you should keep in mind the delivery charge that you might have to incur for delivering the product when you are setting up the price.
Where to look for books?
Old books are sold most of the time, no matter on what platform you are buying those. So, when you are wishing to sell books on Amazon, there are various places you can get it such as those from offline stores who have huge stocks of books piling up, ebay, sale in libraries, clearance sales in case of books that are either of old publication or reduced demands, Craigslist and many more.
But when it comes to getting new books to sell, it can lead to racking one’s brain to find the sources. Wholesalers are the best choice for it because they buy books in huge stocks, you can get it at a fairly low price from them than others.
Finally concluding, books are considered to be quite fruitful in the process of self development. It gives us knowledge and a sense of deep understanding within us. The demand for books will not be declining anytime soon. The various formats might have ups and downs depending upon the customers demand. So, either you are selling books just as a business person or actually writing one and selling it, as long as it is reaching to the customers, you are good to go.
