One way to make extra money, and for some a full-time living, is to sell used books through sites such as eBay and Amazon.
It’s really easy to sign up as a bookseller on Amazon. Once joined, you just list the books you have for sale and how much you are asking for them. When you sell a book, Amazon processes the customer’s payment and sends you the money.Your biggest work will involve packing and shipping the book to your buyer in a timely manner.
When you are beginning as an Amazon seller, there is one all-too-frequent 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 are like the great majority used-book sellers listing on Amazon, you will probably go to yard sales and hang out in thrift stores to acquire 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 profit.” Wrong.
Former bestsellers including even very recent ones are a drag on the market. They probably had massive print runs, which means there are copies by the gazillion out there – and tons of copies for sale 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 huge hit several years ago.
Anyway, at the time of my checking, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered on Amazon. Furthermore, 13 of those copies were being offered for just 1 cent, plus shipping! With that kind of glut, do you think someone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?
Instead of picking up bestsellers in your book searches, try to find books that didn’t sell a whole lot of copies but that might appeal to a specialized audience. This also means that you should mostly avoid fiction and stick with non-fiction titles.
The most efficient way to run a business selling books through Amazon is to identify how much a used book will fetch 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 available that goes into detail on where and how to get hold of the necessary devices and database that will make your used book business truly efficient and profitable. You can read an independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go directly to the book’s web site to check it out.
There are quite a few other ways to profitably sell books online. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined in this article.
Tags: Amazon, book selling, books, eBay, ebusiness, home business, nonfiction, novels, online business, sell books
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