Sell Books Blog

One unavoidable challenge of selling used books is figuring out just how exactly you’re going to store them all. When you’re first starting out, you’ll probably have them in your home. Be careful where you keep them. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to store your books in your garage, for instance, at least as [...]

Selling books on Amazon is just about mandatory for anyone wanting to get into online bookselling these days. You can make a lot of money there if you’re smart and you follow the rules. Amazon is in business to make money, and if allowing you to make some money along the way benefits their bottom [...]

Buying and selling books to bookstores is something I’ve mentioned briefly before. I went over it pretty quickly though, so lets take a little bit of a deeper look into exactly why I do it and how it works. I am fortunate to live the SF Bay Area. There’s still some bookstores left around here [...]

In part 1 of this series I talked about the math of selling books for a penny and explained the narrow profit margins that selling penny books may (or may not) make possible. Given the seemingly miserable financial outlook of penny selling, lets take a look at some of the reasons people do it anyway. [...]

One of the most common questions new sellers have is “Why are there so many books listed on Amazon for a penny? How can people make money selling books for one cent???” Well, they can and they can’t. The truth is that when a customer buys a “penny” book, they’re really paying the one cent [...]

If you are serious about selling used books, you don’t want to limit yourself by only listing on a single marketplace. On the other hand, creating individual listings on all the different marketplaces, Amazon, Ebay, Abebooks, etc., can be very time consuming. The best solution I have found is to use Inventory Management Tools which [...]

In last week’s 2 part series, “Selling Books Starts With Buying Books” I talked about library sales and how they are one of the go-to sources for finding books to sell. However, what I realized is that if you’re new to bookselling, it doesn’t do you a lot of good to know libary sales are [...]

In talking about buying used books, and explaining why it is that I’m sharing information about selling books, I’ve already mentioned “scanners” and “scanner people” a couple of times, which to some of you out there may beg the question “Just what the heck is a ‘scanner’ anyway?” To understand scanners, you first have to [...]

You need to buy books to sell books. You have to pay cash for books to get cash for books. There’s no two ways around it. In Part 1 of this guide I discussed buying books from libraries, bookstores, remainder dealers, and thrift stores. Now let’s look at some of the other resources experienced booksellers [...]

Before you worry about how to sell used books and make money, you first need to become a savvy book buyer. You need to be willing to put up cash for books, to be constantly building and maintaining your inventory. That means knowing where to look, and putting in the work. Like so many things, [...]