A good way to make extra money, and for some a full-time living, is to sell used books using sites such as eBay and Amazon.
It’s particularly easy to sign up as a bookseller on Amazon.com. Once joined, you simply list the books you have for sale and how much you are asking for them. When you make a sale, Amazon processes the customer’s payment and forwards you the money.Your biggest work will involve packaging and shipping the book to your buyer in a timely manner.
When you are beginning as an Amazon seller, there is one common newbie mistake you are advised to avoid. Don’t try to sell bestsellers, at least if you are wanting to actually make money.
If you follow the usual pattern of new Amazon booksellers, you’ll likely go to yard sales and spend time in thrift stores acquiring your stock. As a novice you might think, “This book was a best seller. That means it’s popular (or at least once was) so I should be able to sell it fast for a nice price.” Wrong.
Former bestsellers and even very recent ones are a drug on the market. They probably had huge print runs, which means there are copies aplenty out there – and tons of copies available on Amazon itself.
I just checked on the first blockbuster that came to mind today: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. You might recall that this was a massive hit a number of years ago.
Anyway, at the time I checked, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered on Amazon.As for the prices, there were 13 copies that could be had for just a penny each! With that kind of glut, do you expect anyone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?
Instead of grabbing up best sellers in your book hunts, try to find books that didn’t sell very many copies but that might appeal to a narrow audience. This also means that you should generally avoid fiction and stick with non-fiction titles.
The best way to run a business selling books on Amazon is to identify how much a used book will bring before you take it home from the thrift store or yard sale. It is now possible to check this right in the store (or at the yard sale) using an inexpensive hand-held device loaded with a special database and with an attached barcode reader.
There is an excellent, downloadable ebook you can get that goes into detail on where and how to get hold of the necessary devices and database that will make your usdeb-book business truly efficient and profitable. There’s an independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go straight to the book’s web site to learn more.
If you would rather not go the Amazon route, there are many other ways to make a profit from books online. Four additional, completely different methods are described in this article.
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