Well that was some easy money. I was cleaning my office this afternoon when I decided to make some space on my shelves by getting rid of some old books. I’d been thinking about trying Amazon’s used book program, and I’m glad I decided to do it.
It is almost trivial to set the books up for sale. There are three steps: 1) put in the ISBN, 2) describe the book’s condition 3) price it. You only get a short 1000 character description, so you don’t have to agonize about it like is customary for eBay listings. In an hour or so, I listed 25 books. I started to list another ten or so, but they just weren’t fetching a high enough price to justify me bothering to ship them. The “long tail” sort of books are definitely the more profitable ones. “Jonathan Strange”, not worth bothering for $2, but “Hardware Hacking” was definitely worth listing at $11.
When the book sells, Amazon charges shipping as well, and passes that along to you. You get an email, and you ship the book within a couple business days.
Two sales immediately
I got my first couple sales within 2 hours of listing! Nice, $20 pocket change in exchange for me dropping them off at the post office on the way to work tomorrow. That’s a heck of a lot better money than I’d have gotten at any local used book store.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, used books, pocket money
4 Responses
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How did you settle on prices? Also, do they offer a shipping calculator for figuring S&H costs?
–nickel
Hey, the Amazon used book selling is going so well that I’m going to write some more details about it as another blog post. I’ll answer your question in the post, which I am going to write straightaway.
Sounds good. Thanks.
Continuing the Discussion