With the retail chain stores for books came a drastic decline in the number of small family-owned bookstores. Be it good, bad, or indifferent, it is a fact. Those that still pursue their dream of owning one are many times shocked when they start out and learn just how much time and money are involved in just getting started. There is a building to pay for, utilities, employee salaries, unemployment insurance, health/dental/vision care insurance for employees, property insurance, liability insurance, casualty insurance, phones, Internet access charges, website development and maintenance costs, taxes, and a host of other less significant costs. That neglects the cost of stocking their shelves to have something to sell!

Assume that you are able to get beyond this and survive the first six months in business. Now you will have to start the training of new employees because some of your initial crew will be moving on to other jobs, but you will get accustomed to this because it is something you will find yourself dealing with from now on. You will probably have experienced employee theft and/or shoplifting by now too, another expense you may have considered but thought you could control by one means or another.

Are you having second thoughts yet? You should be. Opening a brick and mortar bookstore is expensive, high risk, time consuming, and returns only a moderate profit considering both the time and money investments, and even then, only a small percentage of start-ups will ever show a profit.

Consider the alternative of selling books online. It requires a small initial investment, the risk is low, the profits are high, there are no employee costs to consider, if you do it from your home you already have the inventory storage building, and comparatively speaking, it doesn't require any more time. Other than a time investment, everything about these two scenarios favors online bookselling. When you consider that you can put your online inventory on vacation any time you want and not be paying employees or worrying about what might happen in your absence, it would seem there is only one practical choice you could make.

Michael Mould

Michael Mould is a licensed professional engineer in the State of Washington and by day is a Flight Test engineer. Several years ago, to earn a supplemental income, he and his wife started an online-bookselling business to finance their shared travel hobby. As a consequence of the bookselling success, several friends of friends asked to learn the business and Mike coached them to be successful online booksellers as well.

The requests and coaching became overwhelming and Mike decided to write a book about online bookselling that captured everything he could put in writing about the subject. The result, "Online-Bookselling: A Practical Guide with Detailed Explanations and Insightful Tips," [CD-ROM ISBN 1599714876, Paperback ISBN 1427600708] was made available in February 2006 with the initial CD-ROM release.

Being an engineer (a.k.a. someone that enjoys torturing data and making it conform to the likes of graphs and charts) and having a dislike for spending time filling out tax forms, Mike developed "Bookkeeping for Booksellers," [CD ISBN 1427600694] a 19 sheet linked Excel Workbook that did all of the record keeping for his online bookselling business. Also being one that did not like to see only the numbers, Mike incorporated 55 graphs so that he could see at a glance how his online bookselling business was performing.

All of these works have received very positive reviews and Mike has really enjoyed the feedback and correspondence with his customers. Since he also enjoys writing very much, you can expect additional works on this topic as well as others.