It's only an online hobby that I pursue during down time, but when people maintain blogs consistently over time, I find it fascinating to read back and study what they've done with their blogs. The individual posts may not be of interest to me. I'm not especially interested in the history of gas prices in a city where I've never lived, but I was interested in the way an otherwise interesting blogger chose to make gas prices in per city a recurring theme at per web site.
So I was reading back through an e-friend's blog and came to where, during the week after person had found this blog, person observed that per own book collection was "totally personal. Who'd be interested in obscure cookbooks and manuals for oldfashioned appliances?"
Hmm. Very interesting. Was person talking about per own bookshelves, or about some of the book reviews that were still at the top of this blog's list when person discovered it?
Let me say this, first. If you don't particularly want to maintain a blog but just want to follow blogs, I love Blogspot's "Reading List" feature. When you set up a Blogspot blog, whether you post daily or monthly or once every few years, you have access to all kinds of features behind the scenes, which are there for your benefit and are not visible to your readers. One of them is the Reading List. It displays the headlines, usually a thumbnail view of the first image, and the first few words of each post at each of the blogs you follow. These entries are supposed to appear in chronological order but sometimes, especially with WordPress blogs, they get mixed up. Anyway this feature keeps you posted on what's going on at hundreds of other web sites all through cyberspace. If big blogs with dozens of posts every day, like The Blaze and The Daily Kos, are filling up your list you can filter them out and see only posts at the smaller blogs, or at one specific blog if you think you may have missed something there. When you follow a lot of blogs it will not be possible to read every post. Usually the headline is enough. You look at the headlines in your Reading List, and see that Martha DeMeo and granddaughter cooked something you wouldn't want to eat, again, nice to know that they're still active and healthy, and scroll on, and see that this web site reviewed some book you wouldn't want to read, again, nice to know that I'm still active and healthy, and scroll on, until you come to a post you really want to read. I still open dozens of tabs every day and don't get to all of them by the end of the day, but for a lot of things it's good to read the headlines without having to click on anything.
So, if you like me as a person or a writer but you do not want to read about the cookbook and manual that came with pressure cookers sold in 1953, I recommend you add this web site to a Blogspot Reading List. That way you can open only the posts that interest you, and you never have to bother opening and deleting e-mails about the posts that don't.
But about the book reviews...Books are a niche topic at best, and within the world of bookselling some books fit into smaller niches than others. What that means is that, although I wouldn't try to base a business on obscure books alone...the more "totally personal" you think one of your book choices was, actually, the more likely I am to sell it before I even have time to write a review about it.
Seriously.
I am, I admit it, currently having retail problems. There are still at least three good empty buildings just standing around, deteriorating, while prospective investors hem and haw about whether we'd make enough money to pay for the buildings. At the gift shop the retailer who was stocking my newest and oldest books backed out, almost all the way out of the whole shop, due to illness in the family. At the place that's been stocking my midrange books, the retailer who's been opening sporadically hasn't been opening, for the same reason. At the secondhand store where I've put the books Amazon tells me are least valuable, they're still moving briskly along, but as that store doesn't sort books at all, I have to check all 35 shelves to see what's sold and what's not, but let's just say the books move.
My philosophy of bookselling is that, if you can keep a book from actively growing and spreading mold or vermin, somebody wants it. Experience keeps proving this to be the case. Moving the books B. Dalton or Barnes & Noble would never have touched is merely a matter of identifying who ever did want them, why they were printed, and letting the person who wants them know where they are.
When I've had books on a permanent display at an indoor market or hauled them out to an open-air market...I've not had people ask for the vintage car repair manuals (yes, I've sold some) but I have been asked, more than once, about the obscure cookbooks. I am not making this up. Especially the "Our School, Club, Office, Church, or Family's Recipes" books, that are printed at the group's expense and sold as fundraisers. Those things are waaay more collectible than postcards or Beanie Babies. They actually move faster than Barbie dolls. I've had people who didn't even come to the market say to me, in town, in a car pool, "Oh I hear you're the one who sells books--have you got any local cookbooks, like church cookbooks? I collect those."
What's hardest to sell are last year's bestselling novels. Old bestsellers do move; a couple of times a year some young person who's just discovered Stephen King or James Patterson will be starting a collection and will happily pay for The Dark Tower. But there comes a time when, no matter how many people agree that it's good, just about all the people who want a copy already own one.
Dave Barry. I never mind having a Dave Barry book handy for rereading if nothing is going on in a store, but Dave Barry's best books are hard to sell because I'm in a town from which 19-year-old nest builders are usually moving away, and only 19-year-old nest builders ever buy Dave Barry's best books from further back than, say, two years ago. Everyone else with any claim to a sense of humor already has a complete collection.
But the titles that guarantee instant rejection from some booksellers? I'll take them, thank you. They are golden.
You don't have to send these books to me. You can always put them up on Amazon, E-Bay, Abebooks, wherever you prefer. I particularly recommend this option to friends who'd like to sell certain pillow books that nobody would want to be seen reading in a store in a town like mine. In a small town people can know each other entirely too well for anyone to want the neighbors to know whether they bought The Book of Love or The Ideal Marriage or whatever else. Well, thanks to online bookstore sites, you don't have to let them know.
One market dynamic I often observe in all secondhand stores is that, if people are telling you "It's junk, it's clutter, it's embarrassing," this year, in another thirty years the sales of it will be fast and furious. The trick will be pricing it in a way that allows people to haggle in a sympathetic way, telling you, "I used to have one just like this, and I let someone talk me into donating it to St Vincent de Paul, or my mother/husband/wife/children sneaked it out with the garbage, because they thought it was junk."
The market trends for different types of books vary from place to place, to some extent between "upscale" and "downscale" stores or neighborhoods. In my part of the world, though, I don't notice the "class" distinction that some people want to see, at all.
Now, admittedly, even in the United States where "class" is a completely separate thing from income, ethnicity, or whether people own or rent their homes, there is a class distinction. Are class distinctions, plural. It's just that books are by definition classy, and there's very little remaining distinction among book buyers, except that a preference for shiny new books is a total nouveau-bourgeois status indicator. (There was even a fad, which I believe is over, for old books as decor items when status-seeking types observed that old-line Virginians cherish battered old books.) In other words, the kind of woman who says "I never did well in school, dropped out during my third year in grade nine to marry my first husband, but my children went to college and Tracy has an MBA!" wants shiny new books. The kind of people I enjoy selling books to, from the former coal miner who can converse with anybody because he read all the nonfiction books at the public library, through the child who does too have friends but just happens to like grown-ups better than other children, on up to the teachers, ministers, and writers, like a mix of old and new books and aren't going to throw out their first editions just because a shiny new reprint is on the market. Not that they have anything against new titles, crisp new dust jackets, sharp new corners, etc., but they look for the actual contents of books and are not guided entirely by the different scents of new and old glue.
There are certainly differences in what people read, and how much. Some people become very well informed and selective book buyers because they spend very little time actually reading--they're so busy with their jobs, if young, or their eyes feel tired so quickly, if older. Some people buy a romance or a detective story every week. Booksellers do form stereotypes about older women buying detective stories and people who are still growing buying horror stories. But for a certain real-world friend who's concerned about "upscale" and "downscale" stores...Two things: Number one, no matter what a good Republican you are or how many local Republicans love you, and they do, and they have good reasons, you still do not belong on any town council anywhere, because that way of thinking ruins towns and neighborhoods. Communities get their resiliency and their truly "nice," as distinct from merely expensive, quality from having a good mix of ages and incomes; in the United States age tends to determine income. And, number two, books appeal to classy people rather than any particular income category, but this is not a problem, because if there are any present-time coal miners who like books, they would be the kind of coal miners the teachers and writers would like to know. You don't see coal dust or motor oil on working men when they shop for books--you see abrasions where they've literally scrubbed their hands "painfully clean."
That said, here's a Top 15 List of what sells well in local markets:
1. Reference books: When people want to give someone a gift that's classy and not very personal, dictionaries, Bibles, and "The Desktop Encyclopedia of..." are good safe choices. When I was working the Friday Market I rarely had to take one reference book out twice.
2. Mainstream Christian: Anything by Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, J. Vernon McGee, Charles L. Swindoll, Beth Moore, or a similar non-denominational mainstream Protestant author, sells fast.
3. Other religious/spiritual perspectives: Catholic, charismatic, Seventh-Day Adventist, independent individual preachers', and non-Christian writings on religious/spiritual topics sell steadily, but not usually very fast. I don't believe anyone currently living in my town is Jewish but a lot of people, as whole-Bible Christians, read Jewish books, and also support Jewish charities.
Arthur S. Maxwell's Bible Stories and Bedtime Stories are the exception. Maxwell was a devout, hard-line Adventist and his books for adults fit into that category, but his children's books are non-denominational mainstream Protestant books that happened to be beautifully illustrated. I've never displayed one of those books in English. There's a list.
4. Local history: All local history books are critically read, and almost all local book buyers will buy them unless they've spotted a mistake. Some local history books have been successfully "killed." If they're accurate, books with local names and pictures in them sell fast.
5. Southern history: The Tennessee crowd love general "Southern" content that includes them, too, sort of.
6. History, generally: Most book buyers seem inteested in history generally. They don't have to feel any personal connection to the places and people they read about, either.
7. Clean jokes: Even the classic canonical works of Dave Barry (Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, e.g.) will eventually sell. Newer or older, harder-to-find comedy sells briskly.
8. Cookbooks: And the more obscure, the better.
9..Nostalgia-trip books: Some people collect books from specific decades, partly as decor items, partly as nostalgia trips or memory triggers. These people buy anything from the right years. Third grade English grammar books? That study of the annual rainfall in different cities, worldwide, from back when the scientific study of weather was a new thing? Campaign books by people who weren't even elected? Bring'em on. This is a small group, not represented in every day's shopping crowd, but they carry cash and spend it freely.
10. Any illustrated book of instructions for any art or craft: Even if crafters don't want to make the objects shown, there is probably a technique or motif they want to adapt for their own original work. Or they have a friend or relative who thinks there will be, when a gift-giving occasion draws near.
11. Nature, science, field guides: Smaller group, more conservative buyers, but they snap up the good books in this niche.
12. Places other than here: Some people actually travel, some "armchair-travel," some think books by and about people in Other Places will be educational for the children. To some extent interest in specific places forms fads (interest in China seems to have peaked, interest in Michigan may be passing a peak, interest in Maine now seems even to me like a souvenir from 1990), but some interest remains constant.
13. The Western States, specifically: The Western States are madly appealing to many people who intend to spend their whole lives in an Eastern State. People watch "Western" movies and TV shows and read the books on which they were based, and even read serious nonfiction books about that part of the world.
14, Personal health care: Especially if it's responsibly written books by M.D.'s, not spammy-looking stuff with crass words for and/or images of body parts on the cover. Eating wheat does cause inflammation in many people's abdominal region as we react to gluten, glyphosate, or both, but the authors of books titled Wheat B... and Your Angry G... would have done much better, locally, with titles like Your Sensitive Digestive System or How Some Bodies React to Certain Foods.
15. Celebrity memoirs and biographies: Even when people say they hate an entertainer (meaning person's act, of course) they tend to buy books allegedly written by people they've seen on television. I doubt that half of these people have even read their books, much less written them...whatever.
Fiction moves, too, and people do ask for genre fiction, graphic fiction, serious nonfiction discussed on C-SPAN or NPR, "classics," and trendy new books, but the fifteen categories above are guaranteed to sell with a high probability of selling within two hours on display.
What's almost guaranteed not to sell is the LGTBQIA category. People here don't publicly buy anything they'd feel embarrassed having to explain to their grandchildren. They might buy it online or even when they're in a city, but they're not going to pick it up and be seen holding it, here.
When do you start selling your personal treasures? I have a few rules:
1. When it's no longer a treasure. If it's a knitting pattern book, I've knitted all the patterns. If it's a normal book bought for pleasure reading, I've read it. If it's a cookbook, I've copied all the recipes to a computer file, so now someone else can have the book. Most Americans have bought a lot more things that they never wanted to keep all their lives than I've bought. You bought something for the pleasure of watching people see it for the first time, and now they've seen it and everyone would be happier seeing it in a different setting. Sell it. You collected a lot of souvenirs of your ex's favorite team, band, etc., and you never were a real fan and now...Sell them. You collect books by certain authors or on certain topics, and while enjoying your collection you notice that you've somehow acquired two or three copies of one book. Sell the surplus.
2. When there's a demand for it. If it's furniture, take it to a neighborhood where a lot of nest-builders are starting to buy furniture. If it's clothing in good condition, its lifespan in "fashion" stores is a matter of weeks, but if it's a practical cotton garment people can wear around the house, just put the right price on it and it'll sell. If it's baby things, the time to sell it is when someone else in your neighborhood has a baby of the appropriate size...unless, of course, the parents of that baby are poor enough that you choose to barter rather than sell.
3. When it's occupying space you want to use for something else. I sold a lot of things I'd always intended and wanted to keep, and moved a lot more to the "merchandise" category, just because I couldn't afford to repair the Professional Bad Neighbor's damage to the storage barn and I didn't want to have things in it when it collapses. I don't plan to replace that barn. If and when I can afford to build a barn, that's not where it will be, and meanwhile the stuff my parents stashed in the barn might as well be in use by people who want it. All the blue glass was sold during Mother's lifetime. I do have some window panes, suitable for painting if they don't fit any vintage windows at your house, and a tragic glass fish tank that's been washed with soap, but might still make a lovely terrarium.
4. When it's worth money and I need the money more than I need the object. I've made samizdat copies of several books, including that (never actually displayed) 200-year-old edition of Horace in Latin, so I could sell the books.
5. Not when someone who obviously does not have enough worries of per own tells me it's junk. That person obviously needs some more things to think about, such as why I'm not talking to person any more. There are two valid responses to anyone's presuming to volunteer an opinion about anything any other person chooses to keep being junk. One is to keep the object and wear or display it conspicuously for at least three months after the annoying mouth has been shut. The other is to buy a half-dozen more just like it.
When selling...it's always a personal decision how long you want to wait for the right person to buy each item. If I were going to display my 200-year-old edition of Horace all in Latin, I'd do it at a "research" type college where Latin is appreciated, not in an open-air market. Baseball cards, Beanie Babies, Barbies, NASCAR memorabilia, glass and pottery, all sell well to the right people but, even in flea markets, you may wait several days before the right people come along. The Internet may or may not speed up sales, since the person who wants the stuff you want to sell does not necessarily buy anything, even books, online.
For people who don't actually want to make bookselling or junk selling a hobby or build it into a business, a day or two is often all the time they want to put into waiting to find the right person for each item. There's nothing at all wrong with donating things to a legitimate charity store that can use them, at that point. The only problem is that in some places the charity stores are overstocked and may be sending donations to the landfill.
If I were just startng to think about what to do with books, while I could still enjoy reading them...I'd be in no hurry. I'd make it a policy to invite each visiting relative and friend to take home a book after each visit, emphasizing that the only reason to limit them to one book per visit was to prevent resentment if one person got all the good ones. After everyone invited to visit my home had had a chance to indicate which ones wanted more than one book, I'd let the ones who wanted multiple books fill their trunks.
Then, I'd load the remaining books up and offer them to different secondhand sellers. Obviously most secondhand sellers aren't going to pay what shoppers at yard sales and flea markets pay. Secondhand sellers are more likely to appreciate really valuable books enough to pay five or ten dollars instead of holding out for ten dollars a dozen. Secondhand sellers are also more likely to say, well, they'll take all your recent books for a dime or a quarter apiece. at which point it's up to you, of course, but personally I'd load the books up again and drive off to become my own bookseller. That's what I did.
Then, if I wanted to clear shelf space fast and/or claim a tax deduction, or if I knew someone else who wanted a tax deduction, it'd be time to consider a donation. Know your charity stores. Some are managed by morons, naming no names such as TRAVIS...,who will try to sell some books for more than they're worth and dump fresher donations while trying to force people to pay, say, 59 cents for a load of paperback romances whose value, in aid of a good charity, might be a dime. Others will display everything and give people a chance to buy it at a fair price, and thus give your discarded books a fair chance of being appreciated.
Before dumping books or thrusting them upon people who don't want them, I'd send them to someone like me who could reasonably anticipate a few more years to sell them. And if you still enjoy travelling, by all means come out and meet me in Gate City. I've inherited seven big lifetime book collections and I can still get through my house because, whatever your first impression of the book review list at this web site may be, I do find the person for each book, especially the ones you might think nobody would ever want. But I still have a lot of books waiting to be read, reviewed, and sold, so you should offer your collection to your friends, relatives, and neighbors before bringing it to me.
I want only your clinkers! But especially any and all knitting, crochet, and needlework patterns, and cookbooks, even if they have no local interest and won't sell before they are displayed.
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