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Great advice Phil. Always try to get pictures of the books. I also usually ask if they have a price in mind, but they rarely do. Most people that bring books in to my store to sell are clueless on the value and want some guidance before we agree on a price.
I gave lots of free info to a Salvation Army manager after months of building a relationship and It went to her head. Shortly she doubled the prices and tripled anything old. and no longer did business with me.
Beautiful thing eh? Yeah I've learned to keep my mouth shut and go about my business. Ya know book people can be few and far in between, so at least I would get excited early on chattin away with someone, pointing out things, letting them in a bit because it was fun, it's books, no big deal, to me we're not talking about real serious caliber matters per se but it always bit me in the back and I would think how pathetic. But that's people for you, some can be effin weasels and so now I move a little differently with my dealings. Thanks for sharing that, lesson learned eh? Good luck to ya.
Good advice. I agree that you are under no obligation to share your expertise for free. Keep the seller talking about the collection and build rapport with them, but when it comes to your business I like to remind them I am a seller of books I buy that which I can make a profit on I'm not a collector. Be clear and kind upfront and you do just fine. Great list of information.
Hey bro, I am just beginning reselling Books pretty much staying away from scanning and learning the trade. Thank you for all of your help. I love your videos.
Joseph! Congrats! Send me an email to, pmontelione@yahoo.com - put your address in there and I'll setup your shipment. Thanks for playing along, I'll do more in the future, I thought it was a fun thing to do.
Great video, Phil. Can't disagree with any of it. If I can add anything, it's to ask if they have sole title to the books. I got burnt on this twice. Once, a family told me their grandfather, who had accumulated all the books, had dementia and was going into a nursing home. They didn't tell me that he wasn't there yet, and he showed up as I was taking the books out to my truck, angry as hell and ready to fight. I had to call the whole deal off. The other time, a brother and sister had a whole house (and garage) full of books their deceased father had accumulated as a former used book store owner. They just wanted them out so they could sell the house, as they didn't live in town. Based on the quality, the percentage of unusable material, and the substantial amount of hauling I would have to do in the summer heat, I came up with a reasonable price that they accepted and we shook hands. I had to rent an extra storage facility for the amount of books I would pick up the next day. I got a call late that night from the brother, he said his brother in L.A. hit the ceiling when they told him what I would pay them, insisted they were worth a lot more, and put the kibosh on the deal. He wanted to fly out from L.A. and do a yard sale of the books, (where he was certain he would get enormous profits and certainly sell every book). The other brother and sister were very apologetic, but it was an enormous pain and cost me a month's rental of a storage locker I didn't need.
Wow that's some experiences you've had there, terrible. Very good point to make. I've never, thankfully, dealt with that extreme of a situation but similiar at a lesser scale. Really good point to make, thanks for the comment!
Christ has Risen Phil! You're right on the dot; showing too much interest in a collection would be like shooting oneself in the foot. Congratulations to the book winner! An interesting book that's worth reading! A bit off topic: in your third take, you looked like Russell Brand (former British entertainer and current RU-vid show host 😄)
Thank you! I use a simple code at the end of my listing so Iknow where to find the book. I'm actually working on re-doing my system at the moment, maybe I'll make a video on it in the future. Thanks for watching!
Some great tips! Could you add the save button again please, Phil? Also, I think the long hair suits you. When do we get the 'get ready with me' video to show your hair care routine? 😆
🤣 I'm sure the audience would appreciate that! Hahahah - that's so funny. I don't know why there's no save button, I got a clickable link, see if this works: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vzPV45H2hAs.html
@@thebookpeddler One way to grow your following and reach some new peeps! Might be worth a shot... 😆 Thanks for the link! No idea what you did but the save option was on there.
I think I found it, it's the three dots to the right, next to the "thanks" button. You have to click on that to save it, it should be available. Let me know if that works when you can
@@thebookpeddler Did you delete the last message? Looks like my response has disappeared too… Before the three dots weren’t visible it but it is now. Thanks for sorting! I also said that the GRWM video might be an idea to reach new people/a different audience entirely, if you’re all about the views and not so worried about where they come from. Corner the market for booksellers with curls! 🪮
@@KellyAnotherAdventure It's very odd but messages have been deleted from my channel lately. Some messages I don't even see anymore. I never delete them. It's very frustrating, there's been really good commenting on other videos but they're not able to be viewed it's pretty annoying. Yeah, I try to keep it completely books, I know others will do different videos like that or get really personal and they do reach a larger audience but I don't want it to take away from the "quality" of my channel, if there is a little there hahaha I really do prefer making these kind of "evergreen" videos so to say, informational ones, because they do seem to garnish more views and continue to throughout time, whereas the picking videos are one and done. If I ever were to reach 10k plus subscribers or maybe 50k I don't know, then maybe I would branch my video content out a little more. At least that's what I'm thinking as of now! It takes time to plan and make these things, so I'd want to be making more cash than I currently do on youtube to justify it and "expose" the inner horror show of my routines or personal life hahah also I don't want my regular business to go to hell! Appreciate the suggestion though, I'm sure they would get a bunch of views, not everybody has been blessed with long, luscious locks on such a fine figure of a man! Hahahha
You should have said, “Don’t be an open book when you are too excited.”😂 Also, I have bought many collections, usually buying out estate sales and the like, how do you know what a fair price is? I always feel like I’m being too cheap, but I know the amount of work is needed in order to get the money back out of the deal. I’m often at like $100 which feels bad for buying 6 bookshelves of books.
Shoot missed my opportunity! Haha Those six shelves could be worth paying $10k or $10 or the owner paying you to remove them! There can be many differing factors to take into account and all situational. I'll say this and use the six shelf example, I'd look to see if there are books I kniw I can move quickly to customers and have a ballpark idea of what they would pay. I make my offer on the better stuff. A big allotment say 1.5-2k books takes me on average 40 hours to process and 40 hours to list, on average 15% of that is viable to list. There's a lot of leg work involved too as you know, so for me after doing it for awhile now I can confidently make an offer and know I'm not being cheap no matter how it sounds, most of the time I'm far more generous than I should be. If I were you I wouldn't feel too bad, in most cases you are providing a service to just remove them. They don't wanna do the work, that's why you're there! If they hym and haw over the offer and you don't want to lose it come up a few more bucks to secure it, they'll take it, ya gotta make yours at the end of the day. If it was easy everyone would be doing it! Good luck on the buying!
You are offering a service removing books and paying them for the privilege. The more they want them gone the lower the price. I think 3-8 percent buy cost especially on clean outs is fair.
@@Needassistance normally for buys I try to 10-20x my money unless it’s really good. For larger buys is where it feels weird even though I know I couldn’t survive on much less than that.
I have never bought someone's collection before. How do you arrive at a price? It seems pretty tricky to do, and related to what you said at the end It seems hard to make sure you aren't lowballing them too much while still getting a nice profit. Maybe once I get more selling volume under my belt I'll have more confidence with what I can get for stuff, though. Have you ever felt that you underpaid for something?
I've definitely had some surprises, everyone has and will and you also can't look up everything on spot nor know it all. It's really up to you as a buyer, if you feel you lowballed the heck out of them there's a couple ways you can look at it, they accepted the deal are happy with it no more needs to be done, or you could if there is a "unicorn" book send them a check for a little more and make them aware that there was some better stuff that was looked over, they'll appreciate that, just I'd advise not get into the details about it. Third thing you could do is make sure the book sells first (which I would recommend) even if you perceive a buy to be better than expected it could sit for a very long time and by the time you take a best offer on it you realize it didn't do as good as expected and you should have just stuck with the initial offer. It's really up to you as the buyer to proceed in how you see fit and choose to conduct yourself. In many cases people may feel like you're "lowballing" them to begin with but that just goes with their lack of understanding when it comes to the difficulties and processes of selling, everyone always wants more. The more you handle material the more you'll learn, remember you have overhead you need to take care of and differing expenses so make sure to have your bases covered, it all adds up. Thanks for the comment and good luck to you! P.S. to answer your last question, I've probably overpaid especially early in the first six years than underpaid, by doing that I put myself in some dire straights. There are examples I could talk about at another time if you think you'd be interested. Thanks for the comment! Sorry for the lengthy reply.
