Archive for June, 2009

Make $1000 in 7 Days Selling Books Online

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

How can you possibly make $1000 selling books online in just 7 days? It’s simple. Just find 100 books that you can sell for $10 each. Still sounds impossible? Here’s a true story: Back in 1999, I was still working for a high tech company, but I was already involved in selling online in my [...]

Buying Books at Library Sales: Good for You and Good for the Community

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Buying your used books from library sales is a great way to find books to sell online. While you and I and all the other booksellers are profiting from the books we find at library sales, it’s easy to forget that with every book you buy there, you’re also supporting a good cause. I get [...]

Bookselling Tools: Auto Repricing (part 3 of 3)

Friday, June 26th, 2009

As I discussed in parts 1 and 2, auto repricing is something you need to be aware of if you’re serious about selling books. Repricing can be done in different ways, but one of the ways I used to employ it is no longer an option thanks to something called consolidated SKUs. Once upon a [...]

Bookselling Tools: Auto Repricing (part 2 of 3)

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Book selling is not unlike selling in any other market: price matters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who believes you have to always have the lowest price on every book. However, in a market where prices and demand are constantly shifting and fluctuating, you do need to know where you [...]

Bookselling Tools: Auto Repricing (part 1 of 3)

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

If you are new to bookselling, you may not be aware of one of the most valuable tools available to you to help you sell books: auto repricing. Basically, auto repricing is done through applications which are hosted either on your desktop or remotely on the web. You set up rules for a group of [...]

Are “Green” Textbooks Really Green?

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Selling used college textbooks is a major segment of online bookselling. If you deal in used textbooks you may have noticed that a growing number of them proudly proclaim that they are made from “100% recycled materials”. Does this mean that the textbook industry is becoming “green”? Hardly. In reality Textbook publishers are among the [...]

Selling Books Today: Nickels, Dimes and Pennies

Friday, June 19th, 2009

These days, book selling can be a game of nickels, dimes and pennies. The difference of a few cents should matter to you, because all that is all it takes to see your margins skewered. Books are selling for less, and costing more. We’ve seen three postal rate increases, in May 2008, January 2009 and [...]

A Book Buyer’s Secret: Finding Used Books

Friday, June 19th, 2009

In a previous post I laid out a few good sources for finding used books to sell online. While library sales, thrift stores, etc are good resources, the truth is that I can’t tell you where you’re going to find books. Books are all around us. They are on shelves and in drawers, forgotten in [...]

How I Lost My Virginity

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Everybody remembers their first time. The nerves, the uncertainty, the thrill. I’m talking about selling your first book online, of course. What did you think? For me, it was a book called “Inheritance of Coat Colour in Dogs” that I picked up for 25¢. I turned around and sold it on Ebay for $44. This [...]

The Book Lover’s Moral Dilemma

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

So I’ve posted about a couple of book selling related “in the news” type articles, like this one and this one. So far those posts have pretty much been about up-to-the-minute, breaking news from articles published on that day.This post is going to be a little different. While surfing the ‘net, I ran across a [...]