Our Latest News: Firstly, I want to explain why there has been no newsletter from us since the beginning of the year. It has been a crazy period at Book Express, and it was just one of those things that kept being pushed to the end of the list.
Why crazy?
In short, we moved the whole warehouse earlier this year, and we have been expanding as fast we can since then to fill it up with books.
The Move
It has been over six months now since we moved Book Express from Wellington to Shannon.
We had to move because our 400m2 warehouse in Wellington was completely packed with books and we were running out of room to move around. I had been looking around for a while for a larger warehouse in Wellington and even further north in Kapiti, but the only options on the market were all far too expensive for our needs.
And then I spotted a Trade Me ad for an old wool store for lease in Shannon – at a very affordable rate, and over 2500m2 in size. We drove up to have a look – it hadn’t been used for a few years and was covered in bird droppings everywhere so looked absolutely terrible. But the owner was committed to fixing it up, and we took a big breath and signed the lease. Three months later he had transformed
it with a complete clean, interior repaint and new offices, bathrooms and kitchen.
Moving our 100,000+ books was a huge undertaking. The really daunting part of the exercise was the fact that most of our books were up a flight of stairs in the Wellington warehouse – so rather than making 46 trips with our van, we hired a moving company to move all the boxes of books (and deal with the stairs). 12 truck trips with their moving crew plus 6 of us unloading and we had the whole lot set up in logical order in the new warehouse over 5 days. After setting up the computers and packing area, we got stuck into catching up on the backlog of orders over the next few days, and back into our normal routine.
So what is it like working in Shannon?
During the winter it was very cold in the warehouse – we had been hoping it was going to be warmer than Wellington, but it was not to be.
Multiple layers plus a beanie was the order of the day. Plus when it rains the tin roof is unbelievably loud – but it least no leaks. On the plus side, the local Four Square does awesome pies and fried chicken, so we are all regular visitors there for lunch.
As a result of the move from Wellington there has been a few changes in the team as well as some growth, and now the Shannon-ites outnumber the rest of us. I have finally moved from Ngaio to Levin, so now 15 minutes down the road from the warehouse. I miss the sound of kakas and tuis
around my old house, but now I get a close up view of the Tararuas and spectacular sunsets.
What does this mean for our customers?
Mainly it means we can keep expanding the range of books we have available – we have grown from 100,000 books at the beginning of the year to almost 150,000 now. We also have a stockpile of another ~100,000 books waiting to add, with four of us working hard to get them into our database and online as fast as possible. And we fully intend to keep growing at the same pace until we fill this warehouse up too.
How Do We Price Our Books?
The short answer is sometimes far too cheaply!
When we are adding books to our inventory we have set prices for everyday fiction and non-fiction books. However if we are not sure of the value of a book we will look it up on the internet to se what other booksellers are selling that book for. Our goal is to then price the book at about the same price as the cheapest similar condition copy available in New Zealand.
However, because we are adding hundreds of books every day, we don’t have the time to look everything up, and so skip this step if we think we know the value. An example of where this could catch us out…
We listed Dean Koontz’s ‘How to write best selling fiction’ in Good condition last week for $7. We had been listing quite a few different ‘how to write’ books at the same time, all worth between $7 and $12 (including an equally famous horror writer’s book, Stephen King’s "On Writing" for $12).
However the Koontz book sold within two hours of being listed to a buyer in the US (who was happy to pay $47 shipping to get it). So we checked its value and discovered that similar condition copies sell for anywhere between NZ$270 and NZ$700. Our customer definitely got a real bargain!
On the other hand we sold a copy of Simmel’s ‘It can’t always be caviar’ for $400 today.
This is a highly collectable spy fiction book from the 1960s which was never reprinted. Our copy was in Very Good condition, and the only other copy for sale at the moment is a Good copy with no dust jacket for $217 in South Africa. I think our price for this copy was fair but not a bargain.
So the lesson is that it is possible to find a real bargain amongst our books if you are quick!
And we sometimes price books we have too many copies far below our normal prices. For example, Frank McCourt’s ‘Angela’s ashes’ is a great read about a tough childhood in Ireland, but we have over 20 copies now so have cut the price to $4 each.
Apologies for the long email - they should be shorter but more regular going forward.
Darryl and The Book Express Team
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