A good 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 incredibly easy to register 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 make a sale, Amazon processes the customer’s payment and sends you the money. Your main work consists of packing and shipping the book to the buyer.
If you are starting out as a seller on Amazon, there is one major mistake you should avoid – unless you are a masochist. Assuming you're wanting 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 novice you might think, "This book was a best seller. That means it’s popular (or at least once was) so I will probably be able to sell it fast for a good profit.” 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.
As an experiment, I just looked up 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 massive hit a number of years ago.
Anyway, at the time I checked, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered on Amazon.Would you believe that there were 13 copies being offered for just a penny each! With that kind of competition, do you think anyone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?
Instead of picking up best sellers in your book searches, try to find books that didn’t sell a whole lot of copies but that might appeal to a narrow 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 through Amazon is to identify how much a used book will fetch 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 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 directly to the book’s web site to find out more.
If you would rather not go the Amazon route, there are many other ways to make a profit from books online. Four additional, and different, methods are outlined in this article.
