Professional writers know all too well that “writing is rewriting.” Think of the text for your auction listings as drafts of a short manuscript. In the first draft, your job is to get the essential information into place and be sure it is correct. In your second draft, you should work on making the text flow more smoothly and fix any omissions or wordiness. In the third draft, give the text a final polish, run the spellchecker, and have someone else read the text to catch any errors you may have missed and point out wording they don't understand.

You don't have a lot of writing room when creating auction-item descriptions — a few hundred words at most. Therefore, many listings tend to be matter-of-fact and uninspiring reading. For example:

This auction is for a new Cox .049 Black Widow model airplane engine that has never been mounted, fueled, or started. It is still in its original packaging and was purchased in 1982…

You never want to over-hype auction merchandise or gloss over its flaws. But if you know something of the aura or the history associated with an item, you can use it to help entice bidders. Here's an example:

Remember that wonderful, high-pitched whine of a Cox .049 engine as it made your P-51 profile scale-model plane leap into the air and start dancing at the ends of 23 foot Dacron control lines? Here is a brand-new Cox .049 Black Widow engine that has never been mounted, fueled, or started. It has been stored in its original packaging since its purchase in 1982.

If you want to know what really makes people buy something, look at some marketing research books, such as Robert B. Cialdini's enduring business classic, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. According to Dr. Cialdini, there are thousands of different tactics that can cause people to say yes to buying something. Yet, all of the tactics boil down to a half-dozen basic categories. The explanations are too long to include here, but one of the categories, scarcity, is a key force in online auctions. “Collectors of everything from baseball cards to antiquities are keenly aware of the scarcity principle in determining the worth of an item,” Dr. Cialdini notes, adding that “people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”