Did you know that you can sell your own used books through Amazon, the world’s predominant Web-based bookstore? You can also sell books that you obtain at yard sales and from thrift shops.
Well, that might not be news to you at all, especially if you’ve tried your hand before at various methods to make money online. Amazon’s sellers’ program is a well known venue for pocketing extra change by listing and selling used books.
What might be news to you is that it is possible to make a good extra income or even, with effort, a reasonable first income by becoming an Amazon-affiliated bookseller.
Now that might be frankly difficult to believe if you got caught, as I did, in the great oversupply problem that struck Amazon’s used-book sellers a while back.
It was so easy to join Amazon as a bookseller that a huge throng of folks started doing it. The result was to drive down prices so far that some books were being sold for pennies – hardly worth the time and expense of packaging and mailing them off.
Yet, as I just recently learned myself, it is still quite possible to find books that you can buy for 25 cents, 50 cents or at most a dollar, and then resell them (using Amazon) for $10 or $30 or occasionally a hundred bucks or more.
What makes it possible is getting hold of a handheld PDA, outfitting it with a barcode reader, and installing Amazon’s entire database onto it. Then, simply carry your PDA/barcode device along with you on your book hunts. You can use it to check the current fetching prices of the books you find, and then only purchase those that you know will fetch a good price when you list them on Amazon.
Using a PDA with Amazon’s data right at your fingertips is the smart way to run a used-book selling business. Its biggest advantage is that it will keep you from wasting time and money buying up books that no one will want, or else will pay only pennies for.
There’s a good ebook available on how to make money today selling used books through Amazon, using the PDA secret. You can read a detailed, 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 check it out.
If you would rather not go the Amazon route, there are many other ways to make a profit from books online. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined on this special Squidoo page.