A Tip for Profitable Online Selling of Used Books
Written by myworldplus on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 in MLM.
A good way to make extra income, and perhaps even a full-time living, is to sell used books through sites such as eBay and Amazon.
It’s particularly easy to sign up as a bookseller on Amazon. Then 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 forwards you the money. Your main work consists of packaging and shipping the book to the buyer.
When you are beginning as an Amazon seller, there is one frequent newbie mistake you are well advised to avoid. Assuming you’re trying to make money, don’t attempt to resell books that are or ever were bestsellers.
If you are like the majority of used-book sellers on Amazon, you will probably go to yard sales and hang out in thrift stores to obtain your stock. As a newbie you might think, “Ah, this book was a bestseller. That means it’s popular (or at least once was) so I will probably be able to sell it fast for a pretty good price.” Wrong.
Former bestsellers and 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 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 huge hit a number of years ago.
Anyway, at the time of my checking, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered on Amazon.And, 13 of those copies were priced at a mere penny each (plus shipping)! With that kind of competition, do you think someone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?
Instead of grabbing up bestsellers in your book searches, try to locate books that didn’t sell many copies but that might appeal to a narrow audience. This means, too, that as a general approach you should stay away from fiction and stick with non-fiction.
The best way to run a business selling books on Amazon is to determine 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. 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 check it out.
Selling through Amazon is not the only way to earn income with books. Four additional, and different, methods are outlined in this article.



