How to negotiate prices with booksellers
Four rules for when and how to ask for a better deal, with a link to my latest new arrivals.
Four Rules for Getting a Better Deal from (Other) Booksellers
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A few days ago I received this inquiry about a nice copy of The Exorcist that I currently have in stock.
Would like to see more pics of overall condition.
Also best price you will take for the book.
Thanks
Rick
If you read my previous post rant, Why Photo Requests Are Annoying, you can already imagine my mental response to this email, which went something like this (with the expletives deleted): I already took six pictures, Rick, what else do you want?
I tried to be more professional when I wrote back, so I told Rick that the pictures accurately represented the book’s condition and that my best price is always on my website. Both of which are true.
Do I need to say it? I didn’t make the sale.
That email got me thinking about how collectors might better approach me (and other booksellers) to negotiate prices. I considered my own experience, and I talked to some dealers and collectors and came up with four basic rules.
Before you get any ideas about using these tips when ordering from my current list, please pay attention to rule number one.
Rule #1. You Probably Won’t Get a Deal on New Arrivals
For rare-book dealers, pricing is all about predicting the future. We imagine that a collector or librarian or other bookseller exists who will be interested in our earnestly described offerings, and we make a wild-ass guess at what prices they (meaning you, dear reader) might be willing to pay. Then we wait and see if our predictions come true. If they come true often enough, we stay in business. If not, we return to our government jobs/law practices/middle management positions.
If you ask a bookseller for a discount on a new arrival, it tends to be counterproductive to your intent of getting a deal. When someone immediately contacts us about a new arrival, we dealers don’t think, “Thank heavens I found the one person who might be willing to trade one pile of paper (dollar bills) for another (a shiny first edition).”
Instead, it works to reinforce the idea that our intuition and experience were right. See, we think, a buyer does exist! And where there’s one, there are probably more. This new-found confidence makes us less likely to reduce the price. (In fact, after receiving several inquiries, I even raised the price of this book.)
Rick, who wanted a deal on The Exorcist, broke this rule because he asked for a discount right after the book posted to the online marketplaces (books are exclusively on my website for a month before they get listed anywhere else).
I didn’t get the sale that time, but his immediate response to the posting of my item makes me think that I will sell that copy of The Exorcist, and it’s on such hopes and dreams that booksellers keep trudging forward.
Rule #2. Good Customers Are More Likely to Get a Discount than First-Time Buyers
Corollary to Rule #2: Customers Who Always Ask for a Discount Aren’t Considered Good Customers
I am wary of granting first-time customers a discount because as Laura Numeroff has taught generations of children, if you give a collector a cookie, they’ll probably ask for a glass of milk.
If a bookseller sets a precedent of offering deals, it quickly becomes impossible to sell things at the regular price. This is not a good strategy for most businesses.
One of my favorite collectors (and not just because he’s on the side of booksellers), Kurt Zimmerman, told me that he always considers the bookseller when contemplating asking for a discount.
“I’d rather secure the book than risk haggling,” he told me. “Getting the book is the bottom line. I’d also like to see the dealer stay solvent.”
Like Kurt’s wish for us, most booksellers desire solvency (and perhaps some retirement savings, a modest house, and a reliable car) for ourselves, and we appreciate customers who don’t ask for discounts too often.
Kurt also pointed out that being willing to pay the asking price makes it more likely that a bookseller will offer you a juicy new arrival first, before anyone else knows about it.
My friends and colleagues Jen and Brad Johnson, of Johnson Rare Books and Archives (one of the few remaining open shops in Los Angeles), make this a central idea of their business. “Most of the best material,” they told me in an email, “never hits the open market” and “those who have a reputation of always asking for a discount” never find out about the prime material until everyone else has seen it.
There is a subset of customers who always want a discount. They won’t pay the asking price out of principle, regardless of whether the asking price is reasonable or not.
All booksellers have experience with customers like this, and once we figure out their interests, we simply raise the starting price of the items those collectors want and negotiate back down to where we wanted to be in the first place.
For my part, I am particularly amenable to helping my customers add something to their collection that is a bit outside their normal price range, and I will often accept a reasonable offer to make that possible.
In order to get to that point, however, it helps if I have talked to the collector or exchanged emails now and then about their collection.
Rule #3: Try the “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Approach
A common negotiating tactic is to bad mouth the item in question, emphasizing its flaws. A lot of times people do that just to have some reason to ask for a lower price. But the practice has always struck me as contradictory. After all, if it’s so bad, why do you even want it?
Another common annoying approach is the one Rick took with The Exorcist, which is to ask for the “best price.” Collectors aren’t the only ones who try this. Recently, a Dutch bookseller inadvertently sent a message to a public listserv with the question “what would be your very best price?”
Almost all dealers hate this question because our best price would be more, not less, than our asking price. From a practical, negotiating perspective, I don’t care for this question because it is asking me to negotiate against myself. I put out a price and now the potential customer is asking me to put out another one when it’s their turn to make a counter-offer.
The strategy that works best for my customers is to make the request about you and not a backhanded complaint that my price is too high (see also rule #4).
For example:
“I’ve always wanted a copy of this book and yours looks great but it’s a bit beyond my price range. Do you have any flexibility at all?”
In many cases, this approach will result in the dealer coming back with a lower price, but that is a voluntary action—a moment of generosity—that does not feel like negotiating against ourselves.
I will often respond to that with a question like, “I could have some flexibility, what were you thinking?” Four out of five times, however, I won’t even get a response. I suspect this is because the customers are just fishing for a really good deal, and when they don’t hook me right away, they go looking for a better fishing hole.
The expectation of steep discounts has always been around in certain corners of the market. It is most prevalent today on eBay. I have a good friend who makes most of his living selling on that site. He told me recently about some Hollywood memorabilia he just found. “I’m going to put it on for $2,500,” he told me. “I think I can get $1200 or $1500.”
Customers trained on this style of flea-market pricing may not realize that it can come off badly when those techniques are applied in the collectable book trade.
Brad and Jen reminded me that its something of an open secret that dealers in America will give other dealers a 20% discount (Europeans are more reticent in this area, with 10% or less being the norm). That standard discount to the trade sets the tone for most acceptable offers from collectors. Offering less than 80% of an asking price, without a very good reason (see rule 4), is not likely to be well received.
Rule #4: Know the Market
Offers will be better received and more likely to be successful if they are backed with knowledge about current prices.
Kurt, the collector, keeps a long list of potential purchases where the asking price feels too high to him (as the leading collector of American books about bookselling and book collecting and the author of a blog on the subject, he often is the market in his field of interest).
“Most dealers,” he said, “will typically extend a 20% discount on older stock, especially if it is a direct sale without the book-site fees.” If “the book’s main challenge is being way overpriced” Kurt will ask if the dealer will consider an offer, which he will then “back up with some comps or pertinent information.”
The dealers Brad and Jen respect this approach: They recommend that collectors “have an understanding of scarcity and the importance of condition, what copies have sold for historically, and what’s on the market.”
A good argument combined with an “honest and respectful” conversation with the dealer may well result in a deal that makes everyone happy.
Kurt pointed out that “advanced collectors generally know the prices in their area(s) of expertise.” This is true particularly when there are few or no copies of an item listed for sale online when the bookseller prices the book.
We dealers can fall prey to our own marketing pitches when we wax rhapsodic about how there are “no copies in the trade” of some particular title. Of course, “the trade” encompasses every bookselling venue around the world. What we really mean is “We typed a few words into a browser and didn’t find anything.”
Experienced collectors may know of copies for sale in places not indexed by search engines like ViaLibri. They may also know that copies turn up every few months and sell quickly when priced to the market. These are factors that are hidden from dealers who do one Internet search on a single day.
On the other hand, when a market is advancing in price, collectors with a lot of experience may base their price expectations on how things were a year or three ago. For example, if your idea of what a copy of Dune should cost is based on the asking prices for first editions before the new movies came out, your protests about high prices are not likely to get much traction.
(To be fair, dealers can succumb to this pricing malady, too, particularly in collecting areas where demand is declining and the current market price is lower than it was the last time we had a book. I’m talking about you, John Updike and Norman Mailer).
Summing Up
These four rules finally come down to this:
“It’s okay to make a well-informed request for a discount now and then, though not too much, not on the first date, and not on our shiny new toys.”
Happy collecting.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Very good. Even a couple points I hadn’t considered. Go Scott!