Need advice: 80k unsold books from former publishing business
My family used to run a publishing house in Europe years ago. We still have around 80k unsold books in our storage, (~140 titles), mostly crime novels in our local language.
The books are already printed and paid for long ago, they have all the government mandated banderoles, ISSN's etc. so this is more about monetizing dead inventory and reclaiming storage space than running a normal publishing business.
I was considering Amazon FBA because I do NOT want to deal with shipping individual FBM orders every day.
My idea was to start small by sending maybe 10 copies each of around 50 titles and then grow or shrink the business depending on the initial test.
However, I keep reading horror stories about FBA fees, returns, damaged inventory, long-term storage fees, etc.
One concern I have with books is that buyers could read them within 15 days and send them back, and amazon might mark them as unsellable and want disposal/return fees. My idea is therefore to sell them at a price so low that it won't be worth the hassle to go through a return for the customer, or package them in sets so that the entire set can't be read in 15 days. But sets is a whole another deal, I don't want to deal with that if I don't have to.
These books might not generate much demand, but are low-cost to me. Therefore I’m wondering if FBA is actually viable for this kind of inventory liquidation, or if the fees slowly eat away all the margin.
Has anyone here done something similar with books or slow-moving inventory?