[INTRODUCTION: This is the fourth in a series of articles on selling books online profitably. Craig Stark makes over $1,000 a week selling books exclusively on eBay. The first article may be found at http://www.auctionbytes.com/pages/abu/y201/m06/abu0039/s05.
The second article may be found at http://www.auctionbytes.com/pages/abu/y201/m07/abu0041/s05.
The third article may be found at http://www.auctionbytes.com/pages/abu/y201/m07/abu0042/s02.]

Merely acquiring quality books for resale is only half the battle, if that. Untold thousands of good, saleable books are "stolen" for ridiculously low prices every day on eBay, and many others close without a single bid, often because the auction presentation isn't what it could be.

This is one area where opinions differ greatly on what works and what doesn't. The truth is that many different types of presentations work, but ultimately, all successful approaches share some fundamental principles. If you'd like to maximize the price you realize for the books you've worked so hard to find, you'll need to pay close attention to six areas.

1. AUCTION TITLE
This is key. If you can't hook a buyer with your auction title, it won't matter what the rest of your presentation looks like, because nobody will bother looking at it. The best piece of advice I can give you here is: do NOT assume that the title of your book needs to be in the auction title. In fact, in most cases it shouldn't be anywhere near it, simply because it misleads or worse, ho-hums your buyer. Obviously if you're selling a first edition of GONE WITH THE WIND, you've got to include it, but for every one of these items, there are ten others where the title would be a significant liability.

For example, I sold a book several months ago titled "Pacemakers of Progress." I can't think of a single reason why anyone would look at an auction with this title, and certainly - unless by some remote chance a buyer happened to be intimately familiar with the book - no one would have guessed it was book about shoes. Instead I titled it "Scarce SHOE Publication HISTORY Shoepedia!" Instead of no hooks, there were now four reasons to look at this auction. The title was an appeal to those who seek hard to find books ("Scarce"), those interested generally in the topic of shoes ("SHOE"), those interested specifically in vintage shoes ("HISTORY"), and finally those who were curious about what the hell a shoepedia was. Moreover, I used an exclamation point after "Shoepedia" and put both "SHOE" and "HISTORY" in all caps. Anything you can do to draw attention to your auction without becoming annoying or otherwise off-putting is all for the good (using L@@K or all caps are almost universally despised). In retrospect, the word "Publication" seems sort of limp, and I'm sure I could have improved on it, but in any case, the book sold for $50.

In general, then, the seller needs to capture the essence of what's being sold in a few words and, if there's room, offer as many reasons as possible why a buyer should look at the auction.

2. PICTURES
CARDINAL RULE OF SELLING BOOKS ON EBAY: Auctions with multiple, clear pictures consistently outperform auctions with one or no pictures. Yes, there are exceptions to this, and yes, sometimes you can overcome an absence or near absence of pictures with an especially well-done description, but why on earth would you want to build this much labor into a listing? If you can take four or six pictures in a matter of seconds and just as quickly insert them into an auction, it makes no sense to do it any other way.

Also, pictures speak volumes. Click, and you've captured the dust jacket blurb. Click, and you've captured the table of contents. Click, and you've captured a list of illustrations-or better yet, a stunning color plate. And on and on. There's no more efficient or trust-building way of communicating information.

Another important point about pictures: if at all possible, use a digital camera. Scanners are not only much slower but frequently produce images that distort the true condition of a book. If the corners of a book aren't clipped off because the book is bigger than the scanner bed, they're just as often obscured because the image is one-dimensional. A camera can take a picture from any angle, show the all-important corners and edges of a book, and do it with much more clarity.

A final point to ponder: eBay is one of the few online venues where one has the opportunity to include pictures of the actual item being sold. Don't cast this opportunity aside. It's a huge advantage over Amazon Marketplace, half.com and ABE. Time and time again, I sell books for prices at or higher than any listed on other sites because the buyer is actually getting to see what's being purchased. In some cases, the buyer wasn't even aware the book existed before he saw the pictures in my auction.

3. PUBLICATION DATA
I routinely include publication data for every book I sell, whether or not it affects its value. This heads off a ton of questions and prevents almost all complaints from buyers claiming they didn't get what they thought they were buying. Obviously, this is more important for collectible books than content-value books. In any case, this information includes: title, author (or editor, illustrator if pertinent), publisher, copyright date, edition state (first, second, etc.), dimensions, number of pages, illustrations (color and/or b/w, if present), binding (hardback or paperback), and whether or not a dust jacket is present.

Next time I'll cover the remaining three principles of auction presentation: Textual Description, Condition, and Terms. After that, stay tuned for HOW TO PRICE BOOKS FOR AUCTION.