Posts Tagged ‘part-work magazines’
What does your Newsagency mean to you?
Newsagencies have always had a wide range of products and that has changed little over the years. I have great respect for my newsagent, they fill a wide variety of niches but I can’t help wondering how long they’ll last and that can only mean sad feelings.
When I was growing up going to my Newsagency meant getting the next issue of Stitch by Stitch, they put one aside for me with my name on it every single week without fail. It meant looking for cards for birthdays or other special occasions, it meant finding magazines to read and it meant doing a bit of banking when I couldn’t get to the bank as they had short hours and I was at school during those short hours. I’m sure it meant other things to different people as there were lots of different shelves but that’s what it meant to me.
Going to a Newsagency now means looking at the different part-work magazines available and evaluating them with regards to their length, how much room they’d take up on the shelf and the final cost. When my kids were little we got the Wally’s World focussed on geography, they spent a lot of time anticipating this each week, filling out the puzzles and reading and re-reading each magazine. When they were older they collected Real Robots and made their own robot. While I’ve managed to pry Wally’s World out of their adult hands and get rid of them I haven’t tried to do the same with Real Robots. It’s a great series and thanks to the internet we were able to look up future issues on their UK website, checking out any problems they were having and see how big it would get. Some of these part-works can get very big, Book of Life has 105 parts while the Book of Life Manual of Survival only has 15.
Nowadays I go to my local Newsagent for magazines, papers, to post parcels as they have an AusPost agency, buy a scratchie and try my luck to win money, office stationery and also to have my paper delivered every week. The paper delivery has changed, it used to be delivered by a boy (or possibly a girl?) on a bike and was subject to the vagaries of the weather, now it comes thrown out of a car and is wrapped in plastic. The change in delivery personnel is due to some boys on bikes being followed by unsavoury characters and to protect them they’ve stopped bike deliveries. Bikes are much better for the environment and also really good for the youth making the delivery but some characters had to follow them and curtail deliveries.
If we don’t support our local Newsagent how will they stay in business?
Backs are important
Backs are sort of important, they’re the cornerstone of your whole body and when things go wrong with them then you’re in trouble. I have an uncomfortable relationship with my back and see the physio regularly for a tune up.
Just wondering
The last six months or so I’ve been wondering how much longer I’d be able to continue with the books and I’ve tried to minimize the number of books I buy and maximize the number I sell in an effort to reduce my stock and this has worked to a small extent but I still have a lot of books and at the rate I’m selling I have enough stock for at least 20 years without actually buying any more. The problem is my back and with the amount of trouble I’ve had in the past few weeks I’m thinking I really need to stop trying to earn money by selling something heavy which aggravates the whole back thing.
I have been anticipating this as while I only admit to being 18 I do realise I’m not and am feeling the effects of age, I started the process of repositioning my blog to try and make money with other means, you will have noticed the recent competition. I’m also attempting to sell my proofreading and writing skills, hopefully a part time job will be on the horizon as well as other income streams. I’m hoping something will work.
I was very careful, took all my pain meds and did so little around the house and I was given clearance to do the market only two days prior on the understanding other people help me with the boxes. I was worried my physio might tell me I have to stop lifting boxes of books completely. I thought I might be forced to get rid of them all very quickly, thank goodness everything I didn’t do paid dividends and I am back to my normal aches and pains.
How do I feel about this?
Mostly relieved, I am getting very sick of having books all around, there are so many boxes and I’d really like to tidy up and move on. There is a little regret as some of my books are worth quite a bit and I’d hate to give them away but if I keep any part of the selling I will slip back into having lots of books so I’m developing a clear plan to get rid of all of the books I have to sell and only keeping the ones I want to keep or read. That will still be far too many and will add a couple of boxes to my already groaning shelves but I will be getting rid of books as I read them and will be focussed on not keeping them unless they’re ones I want to read again. Having said that I am finding it problematic to find a buyer for the part-work magazines and as I don’t want to just give them away to an op shop who might not see the value in them and send them for pulping I have decided to keep them going for the time being. I guarantee it will be interesting continuing to look for part-work magazines and the few books I want to flesh out my collections while not buying other books to sell.
How can you help?
Go through the stock listed on the website, buy what you want and then email me your list of wanted books as I have at least a thousand books still uncatalogued, I will give you a good price and reduce postage if I can. By this time next year I anticipate being totally clear of books to sell.
What am I resigning from?
Just selling books. I still plan on writing the blog, Mondayitis will continue and Squid Ink will continue for as long as he is capable. I will be continuing to bug people on Twitter but I’m not certain about the Facebook page, it does have a cool name, I Like Books is awesome but people don’t really seem to be as interested in it and while I’ll be diverging a little most of my focus will remain on books.
Freedom
This will give me the freedom to speak on a wider range of topics so you will read more about current affairs and my thoughts on them. Until now I’ve felt I really had to focus mainly on books and bookish related topics.
Selling Part-work Magazines
Have a look at this photo:
How informative is the table of contents?
And then this photo:
This is far more informative, much easier to make a buying decision
Which one makes it easier to make a decision on whether to buy or not?
I have most of the individual magazines of the Book of Life, it’s a really interesting set of magazines, some of the information is rather dated and would be good for a movie set, while other information hasn’t changed much. I was getting them up on this website as fast as I could and was just typing up the table of contents thinking that’d be enough for SEO purposes and and not really thinking about the customers but I had time to think while I typed and that’s always a mistake. I looked at the information under the headings and decided if that was all in the listing it would be better for SEO and also better for the customer to be able to make a decision as to whether they’d want to buy it. So I started adding in the paragraph about the front cover and then started adding in the paragraph under each entry in the table of contents. The problem there is I have roughly 90 magazines and still have six more to list, having made this decision to put more information in I now need to go back and add in the information for each one. I’ve done one with screenshots so you can see the difference.
Not quite certain what I’m going to do with the entire bound set I have waiting for a new owner, it’s here in case you’re interested. Here’s the whole category, just in case you want to have browse.
I’m also not certain what I’m planning on doing with my other part-work magazines. I should really continue on in the same vein and add in any extra information listed in the table of contents but I’ve got around 350 individual magazines listed here and that’s a lot of work.
Part-work magazines presentation
I really hope this works.
I had to do a Powerpoint presentation as part of my studies, it had to show off my skills and not my business but they wanted it within a business framework to showcase part of that business. I chose part-work magazines as people don’t seem to know much about them. If I was doing a proper video I’d have put in photos and it would have been much, much longer.
I don’t have much equipment here and I certainly don’t have video editing software, I do have a friend with the software but I haven’t asked her to do any pretty stuff with this so it’s just raw footage. As I totally underestimated the time the upload would take and didn’t write a script beforehand I don’t have a transcript as yet. I should add that in later.
Me talking my way through a Powerpoint presentation on part-work magazines
Update number something or other…
Despite having so many other things to do I’ve been managing to spend a lot of time transferring listings from the old website to the new. I’ve been working at a cracking good pace and if I can manage to do the same each day as I did last night then it should all be transferred over in just over two weeks. Am I delusional enough to think I can keep up the pace? No, not really. It looks like I will have several hours to work on it today and I’d like to think I can knock off a quarter of it, but I’ll wait and see. I don’t plan on writing about it again until it’s finished.
I’ve discovered some interesting things during this process. I was obviously in too much of a hurry to proofread many of my listings and the typing sucks, there’s no other way of putting it, I’ve been fixing many typos as I go and at least one listing has to be checked against the magazine as the description doesn’t seem to match the photo. There are a couple of books that don’t have a physical description while a couple don’t even have a photo. Both of these problems will be on the list of things to fix when I’ve finally finished transferring books and magazines.
One thing I have discovered is that I have a lot of Golden Hands Crafts magazines. There are 98 in the series and I have a large number from the first publication, another large number from the second publication plus a fair few which state 2nd edition. Without counting I’m guessing I’ve got almost 200 of these magazines, I must have a full set but I’m not checking unless someone is considering buying.
I’m working hard on it as I want it all to be finished long before we go away. We’re off to New Zealand for a three week sojourn and I’d like to have something tidied away before that happens. We’re not going so I can read all the way or so I can buy books, but I will be reading, and hopefully buying books. I’ve loaded up my lovely iPad with lots of books and useful apps, I even hope to figure out how to route the 3g from my phone to my iPad so I can update the blog. As I’m not really technically minded this might not happen and I promise to write heaps for publication on my return. There will be some days when articles will magically appear as I’ll have scheduled them way before and others when nothing may happen. I’m hoping to find Squid Ink again, but I might have to trawl the ocean depths. When is all this happening I hear you cry? Not for another five weeks, you’ve got heaps of time to put up with me.
Real Life Crimes magazines
I’ve been having such fun recently. I picked up some Real-Life Crime part-work magazines and I’ve been listing them for sale. One of the problems with buying something I like is that I’m bound to want to read it and then it’ll never get sold, I’ll never make a $1m that way, nor even $1, I will become fairly well read though. These magazines are awesome and it’s taking an enormous amount of self control to list them and not read them.
They’re 133 magazines dedicated to real life crimes and how they were solved. I only have 20 of them and I’m going to list them, by hook or by crook! I promise I won’t keep them. They’ve got crimes from all over the world. You’ve got the Nebraska Newsboy Killer, The Notting Hill Rapist and The Sacrifical Killer among many others.
In looking at them on the website I’ve noticed I have a teensy little problem. If you click on the Real-Life Crimes category on the right you’ll get lots of fabulous books but none of them are actually what you’d be searching for, this link will give you all the magazines and a few extra books. I can’t tell you why it’s doing this and I’m hoping it’ll all be sorted soon.
What? More changes!
Welcome to another week, for many people it’s the start of the working year and I hope you all have a good year. We were painting over the weekend, only one room but the bathroom is pretty hard to paint with some areas so challenging to get to that I need someone taller than me to do them, luckily I have someone here. In between painting I was also busy researching the next move on my website.
I’ve been looking at the part-work magazines and thinking it’s pretty hard for buyers to find and select the magazines they want, it’s okay when I have whole sets but when I’m listing magazines individually it can get rather clunky. So I’ve been doing some thinking, asking some hard questions and last night I made the big decision. I’m going to transfer my website from Cubecart to WordPress, when I say ‘I’m going to transfer’, I mean I’m going to get a lot of help from Jen, she’s a marvel and is going to help me transform my site into something a lot more usable.
The plan is to have a page for each individual part-work title (as opposed to a page for each magazine) making it easier for the buyer to see what is available and easier to buy. I might even group authors or series on individual pages so you can buy all of one author/series in one fell swoop. We’ll see how this works, for the moment you’ll see no change and I’ll keep you updated as things unfold.