Alexander Fax Booksellers

This month, meet Abebooks Bookseller Kristen Alexander of Alexander Fax Booksellers in Canberra, Australia. As a military books specialist, we recently featured Kristen in our ANZAC Day promotion, and thought that Kristen's background would be of interest to all our booksellers. Here's her story:

Becoming booksellers was a classic case of accidental career choice. In 1996, my husband, David, and I had both decided to leave our secure public service jobs to purchase our own business. We eventually decided on a small suburban post office. The post office income needed to be built up and many other post offices over here also incorporate another business. We had a large premise, so we needed to fill it with something substantial. I was casually glancing through the "businesses for sale" section of the Sydney Morning Herald, and one item in particular caught my eye: a bookshop in Sydney was selling either the business, or stock only. Two weeks and 400 packed cartons later, we were on the way to our own bookshop. We eventually started selling books from our post office premises in June 1997.

Although our premises were quite large, there was still not enough room to display all of the stock we had acquired in one fell swoop, as well as the stock we were constantly purchasing. We met a few colleagues at book fairs and when we traveled around and many of them mentioned that they were trading online. We sought advice from some of these colleagues and were put in touch with a computer and database guru who set us up with a specialized antiquarian book database (with integrated stock management and invoice systems) and linked us up to Abebooks. We started online selling on 28 December 1998 and had our first sale via Abebooks the next day!

Initially, internet bookselling was solely a means to sell stock that would not fit into our premises. We started moving into a military niche over 5 years ago, and three years ago we bought a mail-order military book business. These two aspects of our selling complement each other very well and they have combined to become a very significant part of our business.

Our business has now expanded to the extent that we recently opened another premise which, although is a general bookshop, features a large range of military books: much larger than we could ever hope to display at the post office.

Listing with Abebooks has been an important part of our business development. Not only has it enabled us to sell books all over the world, but it has enabled us to keep in contact with changes in the bookselling world, via its information pages and also through keeping a weather eye on price movements. Abebooks has also brought us many customers who are interested in Australian military books who, whilst still ordering via Abebooks' facilities, continue to purchase from us in the first instance.

If I could offer one piece of advice to new online booksellers, I would suggest that they be careful with the books that they choose to list. As a first preference, list the uncommon books. The rarer items. The special books. There is so much competition out there, and there are hundreds of "average" books. These books are the ones that hang around. It is no use even trying to undercut. There will always be someone to undercut you. But if you concentrate on the special books, they are the ones that will sell. And if I could sneak in another piece of advice, I would strongly recommend that you enjoy the experience! Admittedly, there are plenty of people who just buy and receive, and there is no other contact. But often, a conversation is started and pretty soon you develop another online friendship!

The views of the author, expressed above, are not necessarily those of the Advanced Book Exchange.