Making the Most of your Organization's Used Book Sale

By Chris Bernard, October 17, 2011

Our executive director’s husband, Henry Quinn, is a creative thinker and occasional blogger whose thoughts sometimes stray into topics of interest to the nonprofit sector. This is one of those times...

Your organization receives an item of value from a donor. Do you…
 
A: Take reasonable steps to get fair price in sale of that item?
B: Sell it to the first person that gets in line to buy it at a heavily-discounted price, so they can re-sell it for several times more than they bought it?

If your organization is having a used book sale, and you're not making online price-checking and selling part of your plan, you're choosing option B. Fortunately, technology and the internet have made it easier than ever for your organization to do the right thing and choose option A.

My wife and I go to a lot of book sales, and while I’m happy to get cheap books, I always feel terrible for the organizations throwing them. These sales are stuck in the 1980s, when individuals and small organizations didn’t have access to the information or sellers who might allow them to get a fair price for their books. The winners in this arbitrage are the dealers who show up early and pick the sale over for steals, and the loser is the nonprofit. IMHO, that’s a lousy situation.

Here’s what you need to make online pricing and selling part of your book sale strategy. Your plan is going to be to take all your books, find the ones of value, sell those for what they’re worth online, and put everything else out on tables just as you normally would. Note, as you read, that I don’t suggest you use anything other than free tech. And tape. And bubble wrap.

You need to decide where you’re going to sell them. Me, I use Amazon because I use Amazon for everything, but eBay and Half.com, Powell’s, AbeBooks and about a dozen other sites are also in this space. Check fee schedules and think about the support the site has for importing, listing, and tracking books.
You need to figure out which books are worth selling on-line, and which should go out on a table and sell for $1. A volunteer can do this by hand by entering an ISBN and seeing current sale prices for used books, or any number of apps will turn your phone into a handheld scanner – Google ‘book scanner app.’ Amazon even has a first-party app for this purpose.
You need those same volunteers to assess condition and list the books. This is fairly site-dependant, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s not brain surgery. When in doubt, unless the cover got ripped off or someone dropped it in the tub, you’re safe with ‘Used – Good.’
 
You need people to pick, pack and ship. This isn’t cost-free, and it can drag out, HOWEVER it can also happen on your volunteers’ schedule rather than absolutely needing to happen during a weekend when you’re going to be plenty busy with, you know, your book sale. This is also a good opportunity for you to go to Staples and ask them to donate mailers.
 
I wrote a version of this post that broke down the arithmetic of incremental dollars versus the volunteer time required to do this but I was afraid it would get edited out because no one likes math as much as I do. My main findings were that, conservatively, an online component is going to add 30 percent to 50 percent to the total dollars you take in, and the volunteer time required to get this done is going to have a return of something like $35 - $90 an hour.
 
The first point says this is real money. The second point says that if you need to cancel Sunday when you’re selling books for $1 an armload and put your volunteers in front of laptops the prior Thursday instead, you cancel Sunday.
 
There are other benefits of adding online selling to your book sale strategy, too:
 
  • You’ll be able to attract volunteers whose schedules might not allow for a full weekend day, but who can give you an evening during the prior or subsequent weeks.
 
  • The nature of the activity offers an opportunity to learn about how online bookselling works, and can attract a slightly techier, younger volunteer population.
 
  • It enhances your donation solicitation – “You can trust our organization to make the most of your books, because if you give us something of value, we’re not going to sell it for a dollar.”
 
The arithmetic is clear, which is no surprise – if combing over your book sale weren't worth the trouble, book dealers wouldn't do it. And our professional responsibility to our organizations is equally clear: at a $40 - $50 / hour return on volunteer time, adding an online pricing and selling component to your book sale is a clear win.

I don't hate used book dealers. But given the choice between supporting them and supporting the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland, it's a no-brainer. And I suspect ‘subsidizing used book stores’ isn’t in your organization’s mission statement, either. Go get a scanning app, and go make the most out of your book sale.

 

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.idealware.org/trackback/2608

Comments

Hmm...

by ThomasT (not verified) - 2011-10-18 16:37

Count me as one interested in seeing your math! In particular, I'm curious how you selected both the percentage of donations that are typically worth selling online, and what the average increase in revenue for those books is estimated at. Or least I'm assuming you must have assigned values for those, unless I'm coming at the calculations from a totally different angle.

Also, it seems to me that more useful than what a book is listed for is what it has been sold for recently. Is that information as readily available?

My in-laws have gotten into buying and selling old books as a "second career," and I know from them that a lot of the more valuable stuff predates barcoded ISBNs for sure, and often the I/SBN system entirely, making the research more time-consuming. And while straight time & dollar calculations capture important pieces of the volunteer recruitment and assignment pie, there are others. 

Thanks for another thought-provoking post, Henry!

Good points

by Henry Quinn (not verified) - 2011-10-20 09:49

So you're totally right, and I do have a big spreadsheet for sensitivity analyses -- basically, the parameters are these:

  • The % of all books falling into various sale price ranges.
  • Total books
  • Sellthrough rate
  • Improvement in sellthrough rate due to selling online (to be conservative, I keep this at 0%, but I suspect it's higher in reality.
  • Avg. booksale price per book.
  • Seconds required to sort books, to scan books, to list a book, and to pack and ship a book.
  • The difference between what Amazon pays you in shipping charges and what it actually costs to ship (I hate using this, but the fact is, people will sell you books for $0.01, so there must be a gap here, right?)
  •  

The end result for me is a conservative estimate of $30 to $40 / hr for incremental volunteer hours, but if you want to play with it, it's here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqCTX6QogaTPdGV5d20taG1FWmV6Ym9DVEhkMmgybVE&hl=en_US#gid=0

 

Your other questions are good ones as well:

Regarding establishing the price sold for recently, Amazon (again, because I know them best) provides two pieces of info that are proxies -- the overall Amazon sales rank, and the current low listed price. Getting a sense of how those two play together and relate to a reasonable sale price is definitely important in terms of establishing a realistic projected value.

The other point I'd make is that my model still assumes a non-100% sellthrough, even for the books you list online, so there's no assumption that everything'll go.

Finally, non-ISBN'd books are a tough one. For my money, for efficiency, I'd want to sort those out completely, and let someone with some experience like your in-laws take a look at them. Let your volunteers deal with the easy-to-scan -- of which there are going to be a significant number of valuable books -- and get a (semi-)pro to give an opinion on pricing or at least how to search for a price to help you with the antiques.

 

And triage is easier than you would think

by Laura S. Quinn (not verified) - 2011-10-18 09:36

 And just to add onto this: fairly soon after starting this process, you won't need to enter the ISBN to check the price of every book.  There's some fairly straightforward rules that can help a lot to triage what's likely to be worth money online (I picked them up fairly quickly in a summer of buying for a used book dealer).  For instance, mass market paperbacks are unlikely to be worth the time to sell through a site like Amazon.  However, there's certain publishers -- like Norton, Rizzoli, or pretty much any university press -- that are much more likely to be worth real money.  Books that cover a niche topic very specifically are likely to be worth more.  

So in practice, you could assign one or two more knowledgeable people to simply picking out the books that might be worth something from all your book boxes, and then use volunteers to check prices and list them online.