Selling Books Online? Don’t Make this Mistake
A good way to make extra income, and perhaps even a full-time living, is to sell used books via sites such as eBay and Amazon.
It’s incredibly easy to enroll as a bookseller on Amazon.com. Once joined, 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 sends 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 big newbie mistake you are well advised to avoid.Assuming you’re wanting to make money, don’t attempt to resell books that ever were bestsellers.
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 will probably be able to sell it fast for a nice profit.” Wrong.
Former bestsellers and even very recent ones are a drag on the market. They likely had massive print runs, which means there are copies aplenty 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 I checked, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered for sale on Amazon.Crazily, there were 13 copies available for just one cent each! 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 best sellers in your book searches, try to locate books that didn’t sell very many copies but that might appeal to a narrow audience. This means, too, that as a general rule you should stay away from fiction and stick with non-fiction.
To best way to run a business selling books through Amazon is to identify how much a used book will bring 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 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 find out more.
Selling through Amazon is not the only way to earn income with books. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined in this article.

