books: the fine line

Pricing a big pile today I come across How To Write Bestselling Fiction: Discover the keys to success in today's market for novels.

Two fast strikes- it's a book on writing, which was never tremendously saleable and has been savagely depreciated by the modern digital age. And the dust jacket dates it to the mid 80's (1981 actually, I was a bit off) which turns the cover copy into a boat anchor- TODAY'S MARKET circa 1981!
Oooooweeeeeee!

First impulse, sale cart.
Revised impulse as the boss brought it in, $5.


And this is why I took a closer look at it- "why did the boss want this obvious POS book?"
The answer is in the author- Dean Koontz.

Aha.

That elevates it from 'garbage book' to 'interesting book', with the potential to continue down the path to 'valuable book'. The first genuinely valuable book I ever found was a weird Koontz item on psycadelic drugs, which appears in no bibliography. In the pre-internet age we priced it $95 and sold it almost immediately to a book dealer from LA. I see that a similar tome of his, The Underground Lifestyles Handbook, is listing around $500.


Anyway, I look it up, because that's what you do with any interesting book you find these days. My non-internet impulse would be to price it $25 and display it in the case- Koontz has collectors who like his less common stuff and we'd sell it pretty quick.

The internet says fifty bucks. More than we'd get in the shop, so this one looks like it's destined for the warehouse.

Protip: any time you see a cover where the name of a massively popular author is presented inconspicuously, that's an interesting book. It's one quick indicator of an early work, before they became a brand name.