Selling your used books online is another way to earn some extra spending money. Granted you won’t get rich doing it unless you have some rare, first edition personally-autographed-by the-long-deceased-author book. If you do possess one of those rare tomes, you’d be better off selling to a collector or bookstore owner rather than online. However, you can find out online if your old books are worth anything. http://www.fadedgiant.net/ is one website that will tell you if your books have any value. There are other sites that will also do so. This article, however, has suggestions for selling your recent hardcover and paperback books that may be gathering dust on your shelves.
A popular venue for both buying and selling used books is Amazon.com. The process is simple. There are detailed instructions on their website, http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161238. Here are the instructions in a nutshell. First you enter either the title of your book or the ISBN number usually found on the back cover. Amazon will find the book and tell you what it is currently selling for on Amazon.com. You will also be shown a box that lists how many copies of your book are currently being offered for sale by competing sellers and the prices of those copies. This can be instrumental in helping you set the price of your book. Next you will be asked to determine the condition of your book according to set guidelines. Once this is done you are ready to list your book. The shipping amount has been set at $3.99 by Amazon.com. That’s all there is to it.
My first time selling on Amazon.com was a learning experience. The book I offered for sale was a current best seller in paperback. There were very few other copies being offered. I set the price at $5.00 as there was only one other copy being offered for less than that. It sold within a day. I even made some money on the preset shipping price of $3.99 because it didn’t cost that much to send the book. The lesson I learned is that Amazon.com gets a commission of 15% of the sale price, a transaction fee of $.99 and a closing fee of $1.35. My profit wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. This did not discourage me, however. I searched out a few more titles to sell. Much to my dismay, I discovered that most of them were being offered by booksellers who were offering the books for as little as $.01. I could not compete with them. Unless you have a book that is hot off the press or very rare, it is not easy to make money selling books on Amazon.com. On the other hand buying used books on Amazon.com is a good way to get good, used books cheaply.
Another website for selling used books is http://www.powells.com/. I had a little more success using this website. On this website you enter the ISBN number of the books you wish to sell. After doing so Powells will indicate which of the books they will buy and make an offer. Powell’s will pay for the shipping if you are mailing within the United States. Once again I went through my books and chose 32 with which I was willing to part. Of the 32 books, Powells made me an offer of $6.00 for three of them. I accepted, printed out the shipping label and off they went.
Although it is a good way to make more room on your shelves for new books, selling books online is not a money making proposition. I am going to either donate the books to a worthy cause or wait until the next neighborhood garage sale. Oh well, you never know until you try.
Sources: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161238
http://www.powells.com/
Personal experience
