I suspect many of you may not know this, but there's an exclusive group of booksellers on eBay who have everything figured out. They make money hand over fist, sometimes on as few as a dozen auctions a week, routinely attracting final values well above what ho-hum presentations do for exactly the same items. I keep a list of the ones I know of. At present there are seven names on it, and it took me the better part of two years to find them. That's how scarce they are.

If you looked at their auctions, it might not be readily apparent that they had anything in common.

There are technical differences in their presentations, variations of style, even different categories of books offered for sale. Howeverand this, in my opinion, is the key to their successevery one of them share one characteristic that elevates them to a level the rest of us fall short of.

By the way, I don't include myself in this select group. Yet. It not only takes a recognition of what works and why, but also, an ability to pull it off.

Most of this is learned; some of it, I suspect, is simply the expression of a God-given talent. In any case, I think I'm much closer to getting it right than I was a year or so ago because I've deliberately studied what works and attempted to integrate it into my own listings. My average final values have climbed proportionately, and there are those delicious times, more often now than ever before, when a book sells for far more than it seemingly has any right to.

The reason I've included a discussion of presentation in this series of articles about buying inventory in used bookstores is that the kinds of books I've recommended looking for would, if listed by any of those seven eBay sellers I mentioned, play directly into their strengths. You can't expect to make this work with any book. There may be a bookseller out there who can, but I haven't met him yet. No, for things to work well, I strongly believe that you need to offer books that will elicit, or bring forthand here is the key of all keys: an emotional response from a buyer.

If you can somehow get your buyer to think with his feelings, actually lead with them, and not his brain, it's nothing short of amazing what this can do to your bottom line. This is exactly what my Magnificent Seven booksellers do in their auctions. They pick the book they know they can stab you in the gut with, and then they stab you.

Think about what sorts of things in your own life are emotionally charged. To use the example I cited in the second article of this series, if you're 10 or 20 or more years out of college, I can almost guarantee that something that triggers a memory of those days will lead to a strong emotional event. For many of us, college was our first taste of freedom, our first step in the direction of becoming something more than somebody's kid, and the memories associated with this are almost inevitably powerful.

The more specific the trigger is, the better. The reason that specificity is so important is that it's the concrete image, not the general one, which brings forth an emotional response in a buyer and motivates him to open his wallet. When he recalls his alma mater, for example, it's not a general thought of the college he attended; it's something much more specific--the entrance to a building, say, or a face.

This is why town histories have such an emotional appeal as well. They deal almost entirely in specific things: surnames, street names, and the like.

Hometowns are emotionally charged topics for almost all of us. Think about other things that affect you similarly. A song? A toy you had as a child that you later see in a vintage catalog? If you make a list of these things, focus on those topics exclusively when purchasing inventory, and effectively communicate your emotional response in your presentation, you'll be on your way to eBay stardom.

In Part IV of this series, I'll discuss in detail how to create a presentation that dovetails with this class of books. Contrary to what you might think, the idea is not to dazzle your buyer with bells and whistles but to draw him in, subtly, and capture his imagination.

NOTE: Part 1 of this series can be found at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y201/m12/abu0057/s02/
Part 2 of this series can be found at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y201/m12/abu0059/s02/