Mar 19 2009
Amazon’s Used Book Market Has Its Pitfalls
A good way to make extra money, and for some a full-time living, is to sell used books via sites such as eBay and Amazon.
It’s particularly easy to sign up as a bookseller on Amazon.com. Then you simply list the books you have for sale and how much you want 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.
If you are starting out as a seller on Amazon, there is one huge mistake you should avoid – unless you are a masochist. 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 likely enjoyed huge print runs, which means there are copies by the gazillion out there – and tons of copies being sold 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 incredible hit several years ago.
Anyway, at the time I checked, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered for sale on Amazon.Astonishingly, a significant number of the copies were being offered for sale at a mere 1 cent apiece! With that kind of competition, do you expect someone 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 locate books that didn’t sell many copies but that might appeal to a specialized audience. This also means that you should generally avoid fiction and stick with non-fiction titles.
The most efficient way to run a business selling books on Amazon is to determine how much a used book will bring before you take it home from the thrift store or yard sale. Nowadays, you can check this right there in the store (or at the yard-sale table) with a handheld device loaded with a special database and an attached barcode reader.
There is an excellent, downloadable ebook available over the Web 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. 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 other ways to make a living selling books online. Four additional, and different, methods are described in this article.
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