What does Seth Godin have to say about pricing collectible books? A lot, it turns out.

American entrepreneur, author and public speaker Seth Godin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the most common responses I get from potential customers is "That price seems high."

My response is always, "OK, make me an offer." I'd much rather sell than look at books on the shelves. Money in my bank account means I eat better, and can buy more books to sell, after all.

No one does. Americans aren't much for haggling.

Is it also, to some extent, a passive-aggressive thing? A polite smack to somebody who thinks he can just slap a price tag on a book that isn't even new? 

Maybe it's in part, the internalization of messages with which we've been bombarded in the media the last 35 years: book collecting is for elitists. Elitists are liberals. Liberals want to shackle us with the ideas in all those books. Books have bad stories in them, that pollute minds. A little learning may be OK, but after that...

So how do I add value?

One: I save you a lot of time. You don't have to go find the book, research the book to make sure it's for real, buy it, store it, and try to get you to notice it: to explain why it's worth noticing. Even having.

I'm a sort of tour guide. I explain that the wall paintings in the salons or Versailles are allegories of classical mythology that everyone then knew and understood, not portraits of wanton naked women (I actually heard that, at Versailles, in 1997).

I don't know if tech guru Seth Godin is a book collector, but his post today made me feel like he understands booksellers:

Overpriced 

Things that are going up in value almost always appear to be overpriced. 

Real estate, fine art and start up investments have something in common: the good ones always seem too expensive when we have a chance to buy them. (And so do the lame ones, actually). 

That New York condo that's going for $8 million? You didn't buy it when it was only a tenth that, when it was on a block where no one wanted to live. Of course, if everyone saw what was about to happen, it wouldn't have been for sale at the price being offered. 

And you could have bought stock in (name company here) for just a dollar or two, but back then, no one thought they had a chance... which is precisely why the stock was so cheap. 

And the lousy investments also seem overpriced, because they are. 

Investments don't always take cash. They often require our effort, our focus, or our commitment. And the good ones always seem like they take too much, until later, when we realize what a bargain that effort would have been. 

The challenge isn't in finding an overlooked obvious bargain that people didn't notice. The challenge is in learning to tell the difference between the ones that feel overpriced and the ones that actually are. 

The insight is that when dealing with the future, there's no right answer, no obvious choice—everything is overpriced. Until it's not.