A woman shops for used books. You might be able to make good money as you declutter. Here are your best bets for selling your unwanted used books online. Scouting sites are an excellent tool if you want to find the best buyback price quotes across several sites with one click. These websites show what different companies will offer you for a given book. But be advised these rates are constantly changing with the market.
Achieving that level of success is an outlier. Making a living as an author , from book sales alone is tough. To say the least. That means driving your marketing efforts to the retail spots online that return the best revenue for you. Logical, right? With an understanding that you—the self-published author—want to make the most from each sale of your book, we have to take a moment to talk about the retail giant Amazon. Many authors see Amazon as a boon for making their books available and making money to the huge concentration of buyers who visit the site every day. But while Amazon makes books easy to buy, their publishing division now exclusively Kindle Direct, as CreateSpace has been shuttered is less a means to publish and more an avenue to get on Amazon. Are those two things really different? For a lot of authors, the answer is no. Being published means being for sale on Amazon. No matter what you sell, you should be selling it on Amazon. But you have to appreciate the premium Amazon extracts. Selling your book through Amazon directly or through another self-publisher on Amazon means accepting a reduced return.
What Expertise is Needed to Become a Book Seller?
Making lower revenues does not mean you should avoid Amazon. Your book should absolutely be for sale on Amazon because they have the largest and broadest marketplace available. I click that thumbnail and bam!
Smart Packaging
One of the most common questions I get from potential authors who are about to write a book is something along the lines of:. At Scribe, our largest client-base is consultants. A book is what establishes a consultant as authoritative and raises their visibility about the competition. Ashley Welch and Justin Jones were in this predicament. They had taken their sales consulting firm, Somersault Innovations, to a high level, but they were not standing out until they wrote their book. Kirk Drake owned a successful consulting firm that helped credit unions learn to market and sell better. For a consultant, a book is the best marketing you can do. People have started speaking careers without books of course, but almost all professional speakers eventually write a book; and when they do, the fee they can command usually triples. John Ruhlin is a terrific example.
Type in the ISBN number, view the price, accept it, and print out a pre-paid shipping label. With so many different sites that sell books online, you want to find the ones that offer the best prices. And just about any subject can be covered — just as many, if not more, than what a traditional publisher might release because you can tailor your tomes to niche markets. Self-published authors have had big success in recent years. It takes me less time to list individual books in a series than it does totally separate titles, so I will tend to favor those when I’m buying in bulk. Some of the links in this post may be from our partners. I also tend to pick up books I’ve sold before — first, because I will already have a listing created, which saves me some time, and second, because I know it did sell, and believe me, there are plenty of books that don’t.
On the Hunt
If this all sounds like way too much work to make a few bucks, I personally trade-in a lot of my old books and free books I run. Offers are valid for 20 days, and customers can choose to get paid via direct cash deposit or PayPal. Who doesn’t love Amazon credit? With the Amazon Trade-In Programthey will give you store credit in exchange for your used books. Any blog posts you use should cover the same or related topics and work well. And there is plenty of room for a one-person ebook entrepreneur to get a piece of that market.
The Other Way to Make Money with Books
In our recent post about becoming an Amazon FBA sellerit was brought to my attention how lucrative selling used books on Amazon — and elsewhere — can be. Mke also a great flexible gig for those looking to do something part-time or just on the weekends. Today we are focusing solely on that topic: how to sell used books for extra cash. And, we have two successful sellers stopping by to share their boooks. Lori Schafer is an independent author who supplements her income buying and selling used books.
She is a part-time seller. Lori provided the following as her motivation to become a bookseller:. They were all over the house, and I figured it made sense to start unloading some of those I had already read before I had to turn my kitchen into a library, too! I didn’t start doing it seriously, however, until I made the leap to full-time author last year.
I knew I wasn’t going to be making money for a while, and I liked the idea of bookks a part-time gig I could do on my own mkney. Peter Valley, on the other hand, is a professional book flipper.
He has written two books on the subject and is also the owner of the popular blog FBA Mastery. Like many of us, it took only one chance encounter with a used ssnd to get Peter hooked:. The sed are addictive. A variety of paid apps allow booksellers to scan a barcode with their phone’s camera or a Bluetooth barcode scanner and get instant results as to the book’s value, sales rank, and.
So while sen helps to have a knowledge of books, a new seller can oboks completely to the data on their scanning app when making a buying decision.
Had I made the switch to Amazon, for example, I would have been starting with no rating maje no reputation. I did look into it, though, because creating and managing moneey on Amazon is much easier than on eBay, where it’s quite time-consuming.
But when I examined the Amazon fee schedule, I discovered that their fees were much, much higher, at least if you’re not a high-volume seller.
Most used books are not worth very much money, and, in many cases, to be competitive on Amazon I would have had to bioks my profit margins to pennies. Maybe I could compensate for that by selling more volume with tl time I would save, but then I’d be faced with the problem of storage — not to mention the hassle of locating an individual title once I did sell it.
Peter, on the other hand, believes Amazon is where the big mzke is at. The truth is that I have never met anyone selling books online who makes money anywhere except Amazon. It’s where the book buyers are, and where the money is. Both of our sellers were happy to share their favorite places to shop. Often the prices are deeply discounted on the last day of the sale, and you can mney a large number of books for not very much money — plus you can feel good about supporting the library. I also routinely check Craigslist, where people often sell books low-cost or give them away.
You have to be careful going that route. A few times I’ve gone out of my way to pick up a free lot, only to find that the books have been stored in the basement and are hopelessly moldy. A good library book sale can be among the most lucrative sources.
The best sources boosk the oddball ones you weren’t looking for, like professors leaving thousands of boosk outside the Engineering building the last day of the whre. When asked to share what new sellers should look for when scouting books. Fancy collector’s editions are generally worth the trouble of selling if you pay the right price for them, but most of the time, they aren’t worth what you might think.
Unless you know for a fact that a book is worth money, be extremely cautious about overpaying. The same thing applies to first editions — I’ve acquired many firsts that only ended up being worth two or three dollars, so don’t let that fool you unless you’re familiar with a particular title. Also, it’s ironic, but in general, you want to avoid bestsellers. There are so many copies in existence that the used senc markets are often flooded mkney.
I also tend to pick up books I’ve sold before — first, because I will already have a listing created, which saves me some time, and second, because I know it did sell, and believe me, there are plenty of books that don’t.
Finally, consider your marketplace and yo you will be creating your listings. It takes me less time to list individual books in momey series than it does totally separate titles, so I will tend to favor those when I’m buying in bulk. I always ask interviewees for their favorite tools necessary for conducting business.
You are in luck if interested in starting a book reselling business. Peter says you just need a smartphone and barcode scanner to get started. Lori keeps up to date on scheduled book sales at Booksalefinder. If this all sounds like way too much work to make a few bucks, I personally trade-in a lot of my old books and free books I run. With the Amazon Trade-In Programthey will give you store credit in exchange for your used books.
Who doesn’t love Amazon credit? They let you know upfront how much you will receive and they pay for the shipping. Jessica Larew from The Selling Family also has a great new course on selling niche books for big profits. The course is really inexpensive and easy to implement. Great article! I have been thinking of selling used books to supplement my writing. My dad used to be a seller of rare books and did well supplementing his retirement. Thanks for all your wonderful info.
Please tell tl why Scanpower asks for my credit card information in order to optain the app. As long as you can get tracking on it Paige, I would consider Media Mail for books. You always wanting tracking. Thanks for this information.
I wonder how much space people need to store the books when they do this full-time as well as how they keep the books organized. Comments Great article! Question: What apps do you recommend joney determine a books value? Thank you, Cheri. Do you use media mail? How do you figure out the mark-up price of each book to sell?
Most sellers use an app like ScanPower or Profit Bandit. We shared this post on Mom. Cookies This site uses cookies to enhance your user experience. More Info Okay, thanks.
However you do it, you will hopefully be left with large stacks of books to dispose of. I like to start with BookScouter. Remember, all of these websites pay based on what they think they can sell book for, so books with higher demand will sell for. If you live near a HPB, this is a great solution for selling your books.
Start with scouting sites
You pack up your books, bring them in, and bkoks wait at the store while a bookseller whrre your books. The first is through their trade-in program. For the trade-in program, you search your book edition, find the ISBN the 13 digit code typically on the back or on the copyright pageand check if Amazon will offer you money for your book. Fill out a brief questionnaire about the condition of your book, and then Amazon will give you a shipping label. Just, like, try to buy a book from a local indie to even out your book-buying karma later.
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