This is about our stock of ordinary railway books on the shelf in the shop photographed this morning. Most of these are not listed on the internet book selling sites that I use, primarily because if I listed them we wouldn’t have a good range of railway books in the shop click here to view the booksWhen we set up our ebay shop see http://stores.ebay.co.uk/thanet-books to sell the local books I publish there, we wanted to start with some feedback so we put some railway books for sale there, what became abundantly clear was that if we put the whole railway section in an ebay auction most of it would sell for more than it was priced at on the shelves.
The local books that I publish obviously as I manufacture them in the bookshop there is no supply problem, so I market them everywhere I can on the web mainly at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ which is the cheapest place to buy them online.
Anyway coming back to the railway books, deliberately not selling them online and why I am putting up the photographs, mainly as it’s mostly local people who look at this blog and the mostly tend to come to the shop to buy books that they see. You have to appreciate that the customers that come in the shop, unlike internet customers, generate abut us much good stock as they take away, by using our exchange voucher scheme or selling us their books I the need some ready cash.
Funny really back in 1999 when I first made forays into internet bookselling, I rather assumed that I could just take pictures of the books on the shelves and people would browse the shop on the internet and email me for anything they were interested in.
How little I knew at the time, however now I have come full circle and this very primitive method is actually working.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteI can supply you with some copies of East Kent Explored, my book on the history of the local bus company if you wish. I'm down to my last couple of dozen if interested.
Cheers.
Nick
Thanks Nick I am down to my last copy so would like 6 copies, we also seem to have sold out of your Broadstairs book and would like 6 of that too, have you got any of your Dreamland book left of so 10 of that too please.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally the reason you don’t see it with the other bus books as it’s in the local section, which is the only full price section in the shop.
Many thanks Michael,
ReplyDeleteI'll sort those out for you - sorry no Dreamland at present. Copy sold on ebay this week for an eye watering £36 plus £3 p&p!.
NE
Oh well it was worth a try, they should have come in the shop come in the shop where I have got both the first and revised editions on the shelf at £30 each, of course I could put them on ebay but going down that road just means the shop isn’t worth visiting.
ReplyDeleteI purchased most of my Discworld novels from your shop many moons ago when I was at college, I always liked to come and browse the books about the history of Thanet but always being skint meant that I could never buy them to read, luckily however my mum is doing a lot of research and has an interest (or obsession!) with local history so she buys quite a lot so if I'm lucky then I get to read hers lol although since I no longer live at home with my parents I think its about time I started buying books of my own...!
ReplyDeleteLml couple of thoughts here, you don’t actually need money to collect secondhand books, while experiencing acute skintitus down graduate lane, I actually made money by buying books in charity shops and from booksellers that had made mistakes and selling them to other booksellers.
ReplyDeleteQuite recently I bought a book in Broadstairs for £20 and sold it to a bookseller in Folkestone for £500, many moons ago I remember one significant purchase from Deighton Bell a very famous bookseller in Cambridge who had in their basement a department where all books were 20p from them I bought a mutivolume set of books on lichens at 20p per volume and sold the set to the specialist natural history bookseller Wheldon and Wesley near Stevenage for £1,200,
Recently my wife found a book that I had put in our sale section where all the hardbacks are 10p and all the paperbacks are 5p, it was a play signed by the actors, something I had missed, she sold it on the internet for £80.
The golden rule being if it’s specialist enough it’s probably OK.
The other thought is that bloggers are treated quite differently in the bookshop, as are artists musicians politicians journalists and authors, the proviso being that fame and anonymity are reversed expedientials.
Yes Michael, I can comfortably say that I bought most of my second hand book collection from your shop.
ReplyDeleteWhilst I was at college I regularly used to pop in on a Saturday morning and try and complete my Clive Barker or Stephen King collection without resorting to buying them brand new !!
Some years later I sold a load of them back to you so someone has now probably built up the same collection. I guess these things go round in circles.
You can't beat the feeling of browsing round a second hand book shop for bargains - a far cry from the corporate, sterile atmosphere in Waterstones et al.