After quite a while resting on my more or less laurels (past listings) it's time to get a move on and put up some more listings. My goal is five books every day from now on. This should be achievable, but not according to my past performance.

These books get listed in three places: on Amazon, Biblio, and Half. Books without ISBNs (older books) generally will not be listed on half. My prices might vary between these three places. Amazon and Half tell me competing prices, so I peg mine on them. Thus, if the lowest price for Deadly Percheron is $98 on Amazon, I might peg mine at $95. If it weren't my only copy maybe I'd be more reasonable. In fact, I think my Biblio listing is more reasonable.

Going forward (and possibly backward), links to titles of books will send you to the main Amazon listing. My listing will be somewhere amidst the other maybe 237 listings. This is where my photo of the book can be seen, which will probably be a better one than the one Amazon features. Half doesn't let me attach my own photo—at least I don't think it does. Photos are also at biblio. Lots of older listings still don't have photos. Nor updated prices.

I've been lousy at selling direct via email. Sorry about that, if you've tried me. Listing through the major portals keeps me honest—also prompt and reliable.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

still here

Jeez, I've been lousy about posting anything in this blog. Not that I haven't been meaning to -- at least to mention that I'm still here. You can find evidence by clicking on the link above to New Arrivals and see that I have at least been cataloging books every once in a while. I really should copy the listings as they occur over to here, because I don't think searchbots check the data in Docs (even if shared publicly). I may be wrong about that, but when I tried a search one time the blog entry came up but not the doc entry. My thinking now, never to be relied on, is to make it a goal to catalog five books a day, and transfer the entry here. Ideally, I should copy and paste the whole schmear here now, and maybe I will.
When I catalog books I usually have a random stack sitting beside me, and I just run them through in order, with no preference on which might best represent my inventory. I have been ending up with quite a few books I wouldn't have tried in my printed paper catalogs of yore, but these usually interest me as much as the speculative and supernatural fiction I specialize in. I won't go into the various factors that play in what books end up in my clutches. That would be propounding the obvious, but I will say that collectibility is not as high on the list as it probably should be.
Last weekend my wife put her foot down on all the stacks that have been creeping in on our living area (as opposed to my warehouse/office are in the cellar). They had just been accumulating at a quicker rate over time than I had been dispatching them to the listings and shelving them somewhere where they could hopefully later be found for sending. I hate to box up books that have not been cataloged, because there are plenty of other boxes in the same limbo where the way things have been going I might never get back to them.
Thanks to my covershot photos I am able to see inside these boxes (and you can too), so the gone is not necessarily forgotten. Now that I've boxed up most of the recent used-book arrivals, I have it in mind to fight against the current by at least cataloging five books a day -- making how many in a year? Plenty! Of course I realize that my past is littered with such well-conceived but ill-executed schemes...so less talking about it, and more the doing of it!

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