Selling Books Online
You have to try to hit garage sales that are multi family or church rummage sales to get more peoples books at one time. You only have a certain amount of time before the garage sales end on saturday and sunday. So you want to hit as many garage sales early in the morning to get the best selection of product.
Try to haggle on prices. Most people want to get rid of their books quickly as to make room in their homes. So whatever price they are selling you can usually get them to go down on the price if you are willing to make a bigger purchase. I try to buy as many books as I can from one person to make a bigger sale and it will save on gas as well. I usually will not pay more than a dollar per book if it is hardbound. If the book is softbound I will pay no more than 50 cents. There are times when I have paid more but certainly no more than two or three dollars. The key to finding books worth money is to make sure the book doesn’t have the kiss of death on it. This means it cannot say anything about being the number one seller.This means that everyone already has the book and you will probably be selling that book online for two or three dollars because there will be multiple copies available.
Try to get books that are rare from smaller publishers. The more abstract the better. For example I sold a book about people who train eagles and it sold for over twenty dollars. But when you try to sell a cookbook from a major publisher like Southern Living chances are there are dozens of copies that other people are trying to get rid of. This is not always the case. But if you see a book you think is common you shouldn’t buy it or you will waste your time. Also do not buy any baby books because everyone is already selling their old copy online. This is not always true but my experience is that ninety percent of the time this is what happens.
You will learn how to spot the duds as you start putting your books online. You will see that there are multiple copies of certain books and other books you may have the only copy that is used. Of course the new version will be available online for more money. But you can offer a used book for less and still make a profit.
My favorite place to sell my books online is Amazon. The internet site is set up so that you can list the ISBN number and it will pop up the picture of the book and a description which makes it much less labor intensive. You must sign up with them and you will pay a fee for each book that is sold. You can choose to be charged by the book or you can pay a monthly fee and no matter how many books you sell it will be one low fee. I personally have made over two hundred dollars every two weeks. By the time you buy your books on the cheap and mail them off in envelopes you buy and then paying for postage to mail the books to your customers and use your gas to drive around town to different garage sales you may make half of that in a week in profit. But it is something that you can do in your spare time. Overall it is a great way to make extra money.
Garage sales are listed in the paper almost everyweek. The key is to dump new books online everyweek to build up your inventory.
I sell books online everyday since I have over a thousand books online at this time. I have also found books on
and other small online bulletin boards that were being given away for free. Some people just want to get rid of their books to make room for new things.
