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If you find that your sales are starting to slow down, the one area you must analyse is your listing activity. There is no doubt that your sales reflect your listing activity: increase your listings and you will increase your Amazon profits.

How to increase your Amazon profits

Remember to list books with various values and sales rankings. The reason for this is important as not all titles sell as quickly as others and if you are listing lots of older books with ‘long tails’ you may end up having to wait ages between sales.

You need to ensure, before you submit your books for sale, that you will still make a profit on the sale after deductions for postage and packaging. The same costs are associated with selling a book no matter what its value, and of course there is the same amount of effort required to dispatch, so, make sure your pricing reflects this where you can.

As you know, I do not recommend that, as beginners, you sell 1p books (unless you sell using FBA), or heavy low value books - the profits are far too small or indeed, non existent. However, you do still need to mix up the type of books you list.

Look for niche subjects including biographies, cookery books etc, don’t just look for hardcover non-fiction though, as it is perfectly possible to find paperbacks that do have value on Amazon. Look for newly released titles and subject matters like Christianity, self-help and any uncommon/ out of print paperbacks. Just remember to check the ISBN’s before buying.

It is not only the type of books you list, but how consistently you list them that is key: between 30 and 50% of my daily sales come from new listings. The rest come from older listings, so it really is important to list new stock in order to maintain or increase your income levels.

Another way to reinvigorate your sales is to refresh prices on older listings. This can induce a flurry of sales from your older stock leaving you more room to list new titles and in turn, as you list more stock so your sales will reflect the extra activity thus boosting your income.

Tip of the week - top up your digits

Sometimes you may find on older titles that the ISBN only has 9 digits, but in most cases on Amazon you need either 10 or 13 digit ISBNs in order to list your books. So, if you are faced with this problem, simply try putting a zero at the start of the 9-digit number… you may find that with this extra number the title will be recognised by Amazon, which means of course that you can then list it and offer it for sale.

by Sharon Fussell Amazon Trading Expert Sharon Fussell is the editor of Bookseller's Profit Club and helps people to become successful Amazon pro-merchants You can sign up for her free weekly eletter here: Recent Articles by Sharon Name Email

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