My First Book Shipment + The Fear of Failure

You have to start SOMEWHERE. Stop thinking and start doing.

Intro

Welcome back!

For those of you who read my last post and actually applied it, I hope you managed to find success. Sourcing profitable books when you’re first starting can be difficult and I wanted to point you in a direction that can make it easier for you. That being said, I want to talk about a more general topic that can be applied to any sort of business venture or goal you might find yourself pursuing. Today I’ll be talking about my first book shipment, what I learned from it, and how the best thing for you to do right now is to just get started (if you haven’t already).

My First Book Shipment

While I might know a lot about flipping books now, when I started I was clueless. I would spend several hours trying to find a profitable flip, only to come up short most of the time. After two weeks of research, I managed to find 12 books that I thought would be good flips and sent them in to Amazon. So how did I do?

The stats from my first shipment

Let me break down the numbers for you:

Money Spent: $156.39

Total Sales: $355.67

Total Fees: $139.29

Total Profit: $59.99

Average ROI: 39.8%

I also tried doing this without a paid Keepa subscription, and in hindsight I made a lot of terrible buys. Here’s a graph of one of the books I bought (I still don’t know how I sold it):

My worst book purchase. The time I sold it is marked with the red arrow.

This one had 11 sales in the last year. How much did I make from this book? $1.79. Yeah, in hindsight I really didn’t know what I was doing. I even lost money on 2 books.

What I Learned

Overall, I learned two important lessons from this first book shipment. These should be good things to keep in mind if you’re just starting out as well:

• Do not try to flip a book that sells for less than $40 prime (unless you can get it really cheap). Amazon fees are a pain in the ass and you won’t make any money worth your time.

• Do not skip out on a Keepa subscription. If you end up buying a book that barely gets any sales, you’re going to have a very hard time getting rid of it.

In the end, this first book shipment made me about $60 after 2 weeks of research. That sounds really bad (and it is), but it was necessary for my improvement as a book flipper. I was able to learn from my mistakes and make better decisions when it came to buying books.

The Fear of Failure (Just Start)

So why did I share all of this information with you? The answer is simple - to motivate you to just get started. When it comes to starting anything new, people seem to have this idea in their heads that they need to have a well thought out plan, or they have to know exactly what they’re doing before they get started. They’re scared of failing. I used to be like that as well, doing several days of research before buying my first books. However, I now understand that if you want to succeed at something you have to just get started and make a lot of mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them will do much more for your improvement than any book or course. If I never sent in this first book shipment and made barely any money, I wouldn’t know the things I know now. You don’t need to have a plan to succeed in business. You just need to be willing to adapt and learn as you go. You will fuck up. You will lose money. What separates the winners from the losers is learning from those mistakes and using them to achieve better results next time. You haven’t truly failed until you give up.

Conclusion

I know this post was way shorter and a bit all over the place, but I figured that someone reading this will need it (I know it would have helped me a lot). As always, I’m more than willing to answer questions and take suggestions for post topics in the comments. I plan on making another post in the coming weeks about my preparations for the upcoming busy season, so keep an eye out for that. I wish you all the best.