Book Selling Online
Books are big business! You can grab your share of this market by reselling books online. There are lots of easy ways to get started because of well-known book sources such as eBay, Half.com and Amazon.com. Each of these have portals set up already that you can piggyback onto instead of having to create all your own listings and publisher information. Start with the books you already have on your bookshelf that you don’t want anymore. Create a seller account, add your titles and set the price you’d like to sell the book for. I personally like the Amazon.com interface because it’s easy for me to manage my inventory for all the books I have.
Once you get started with a few sales, you’ll see how easy it is to put up a few listings and just wait for people to buy. As I’m getting the hang of the book market, I find myself picking up entire personal collections at yard sales and second-hand stores. I grab copies of books for as little as a nickel and then sell them for a few bucks each. It takes a number of sales to really start seeing some money come in, but it’s also very easy to list titles and just let the system do its thing while I’m working on other projects.
Another way to make money in this industry is to focus on textbooks only. There are definite times when textbooks are in high demand (like in mid-August and late-December right before new semesters start for college). People look for textbooks in off times when the prices are lower and then list them during high-demand times for a profit. You can also work with your local colleges to buy books directly from the students. Look for bulletin boards where students can post messages about books for sale, and offer a price to them.
Keep an eye out at antique stores for rare books too. Once you have an idea what niche books are going for, you can keep an eye out for great deals. It’s even easier if you have a mobile Internet device so you can look up specific books on the spot and see what they are selling for before you buy it from the antique or second-hand store.
A good friend of mine makes his entire living with Amazon book selling. His basement is a carefully cataloged library by title, and he checks book in and out of his inventory every day. He loves the added bonus of being able to read the interesting books while they are in his inventory.
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