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Easy Weekend Biz: Sell Used Books
The best places for me to find cheap books were the public libraries around the Bay Area. Some of these libraries hold big annual sales where books are sold off in brown paperbags for $3 to $5 per bag. In one particular sale I got six bags of books for under $20 and sold a good amount of them for over $500. In particular, one rare out of print book sold for $75 almost instantly.
My other sources for merchandise included library bookstores and a local recycling center that gave out books for free before they decided to shred the unwanted ones. Some large church sales were also quite fruitful.
Non-fiction books keep their values a lot better because they are usually released in smaller printings than popular fiction, and people tend to search for specific used nonfiction books to buy. Topics like mysticism , aliens, and self help generally sold pretty well.
After a year of selling used books, I sold nearly 1000 books to people in 16 countries and made a profit of $5000 to $6000. For the time I put into selling books I made somewhere around $12 to $14 an hour.
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Photo by Renaudeh.
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John Roberts on July 17th, 2009 10:46 am
I find that the books you can get at a bag sale have all been picked over and there is not that much worth selling online. The best is to go on opening night, especially if they have a special preview night for friends. It is well worth becoming a member of the local libraries friends group to get first crack at the books.
Lonna Swarr on May 19th, 2011 11:45 am
Just browsing and found your website – thanks for the share.
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