Odds and Ends Post

Here is a hodgepodge of things going on here at the Home Biz Blues house hold:

• Amazon - Finally got all (or as many as were in decent shape) of the Lot of Books listed on Amazon Marketplace. My current inventory of Used and collectible books now comes to about 750 books. With so many books I had to devise a way to keep track of them, so I labeled my book shelves and made an access database to keep track of where each listed book was located (which book case, shelf, and general location on shelf.) Much easier than looking through hundreds of books randomly placed on shelves. Doing pretty good - selling about 15 to 30 books a month. Now my number one need is to go out and find more books to sell.

• Other Amazon news - my positive rating number has finally gone back up to 90%, which should help sales. My goal is to maintain a 95% and above positive rating, so still a ways to go (Only 10 more good ratings should do it).

• Personalized books - As ever this time a year, the personalized book business is slow. This was not helped when Google decided to make madluckbooks.com disapear from the search results for such keywords as "personalized books" and "personalized story books". This has happened before, but that time it only lasted for a few days. This time it lasted for well over a week and I was starting to panic. Interestingly, yahoo improved my rankings for those same words at about the same time. All of a sudden I was getting hits from Yahoo that I had never gotten before, and nobody was coming from Google. Eventually Google decided to stop being mean and madluckbooks.com began showing up on their searches again (though maybe not ranked as hight as I had been). I'll do the monthly update on search engine rankings soon to see where everything balanced out.

• Schools out for summer after this week so I will have to return to my basement hole to work to keep out of the kids way.