It's been over two years since I started tracking the stats of library book sales. I thought it would be interesting to the results of a profitable book sale. I will be showing the total profit, percentage of books sold, and impact of storage fees.
In June of 2013, I was on vacation in the east coast. While I was there, I attended a library sale in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Here are the results:
Purchases
Books Purchased: 335
Books Sold: 292
Percentage of Books Sold: 87%
Sales
Amazon Sales: $3015.45
Amazon Fees: ($1318.38)
Cost of books: ($234)
UPS Inbound Shipping: ($105.11)
Estimated Storage Fees: ($38)
Total Profit: $1319.96
Averages Per Book
Average Sale Price: $10.19
Average Amazon Fee: ($4.51)
Average Cost of a Book: (.70)
Average UPS Inbound Shipping Cost Per Book: (.31)
Average Profit per Book: $4.67
The graph below shows the month to month profits. All Amazon fees, cost of books, and UPS shipping have already been subtracted. If you notice the first month’s profit is lower than the month two and three. That’s because my upfront costs were in month one (i.e. cost of books and UPS shipping).
The red bar shows the estimated storage fees. You will notice that impact of storage fees is relatively low – even on month 24. I just need to sell at least one book per month to cover the monthly storage cost.
Profit Per Month (in $)
(click image to enlarge)
The next chart shows the percentage of books that sold each month. As you can see most of the books sold within the first three months (64%).
Sell Through Rate (%)
(click image to enlarge)
You can get similar stats from SourceProfit or Inventory Lab. Want to list your books fast? Try ScanLister free for 8 days.
what was the highest sales rank you would consider buying at that book sale? the ones that all sold quickly, do you know the average sales rank of those?
I didn’t track the rank on these, however, I did a blog post on sales rank here:
https://booktothefuture.com/sales-rank-vs-time-until-sale/
Nathan, this is great information, thanks for sharing!
Jim, looks like about 25% of these had a sales rank greater than 1 million, based on Nathan’s original post:
https://booktothefuture.com/book-sale-experiment-2-how-profitable-is-a-three-day-sale/
Nathan, this is great information, thanks for sharing!
Jim, looks like about 25% of these had a sales rank greater than 1 million, based on Nathan’s original post:
https://booktothefuture.com/book-sale-experiment-2-how-profitable-is-a-three-day-sale/
you’ll notice that he sold 81% of the books from this sale the first year.
Thanks for updating this experiment. It’s been interesting following what’s happened since you started this 2 years ago.
Thank you Serena! I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Great info, thanks! A technicality-type of question: how did you lug 300+ books to the checkout counter? Did you bring a wheelbarrow with you to the sale? 😉
It was 3-day sale so I averaged about 100 books a day. The sales usually provide boxes and a dolly to make it easy to lug to the car. Some sales even have volunteers that will carry the books to your car.
Is there a point in time in which you’ll “destroy” or have any books recalled from that sale? Like if you haven’t sold 1 book for 3 months from that set.
I haven’t had to destroy books yet. As I matter of fact, I just sold another book from this sale for $30. It had a ranking of 3.8 million. So it makes sense to hold on to all of the books with storage fees at $1 per month at this point.