Sell What People Want
Looking for the “buyer waiting” status can help you figure out which books are in high demand.
At the time of this writing, John Grisham’s novel A Painted House has 362 sellers offering it in Amazon’s Marketplace. There’s probably some demand for the book, but listing your copy for sale alongside 362 others is a bit of a crapshoot. We can safely say that the supply has been met for the demand.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Amazon could just tell you which of your books are in high demand? Well, they do—it just takes a bit of digging. The trick is to find “buyer waiting” statuses for your books.
If someone’s on a product detail page and there are no Marketplace listings for the item, they’ll have the option to “Order it used.” Clicking this link doesn’t really order the item from anyone, it just lets Amazon know that someone is interested in buying that product used. (They’re then notified via email when someone offers the book used.) Amazon, in turn, lets everyone else know that someone’s interested by including a “buyer waiting” message, like the one in Figure 4-7, right on the product detail page.

Figure 4-7. “Buyer waiting” message on the product detail page
You could visit the product detail page for every item you own and see if any are in immediate demand, but if you own more than five or six books or CDs, that’s going to be a time-consuming process. Instead, you ...