Selling Used Books on amazon.com

Before I came up with the great idea of selling personalized children's books, I tried selling used books on amazon.com. I even bought ten or twenty first edition novels from a local library (they only cost about a dollar a book) to list on Amazon. When I went to list the books however, I found that most of them were already being sold for as low as a penny a book. I couldn't make any money that way so I gave up on the idea.

Well a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on Steve Weber's Blog - Selling Books. Apparently he has been able to make a decent income doing just that - selling used books on Amazon. Needless to say my interest was renewed. Weber published a How to Guide - The Home Based Bookstore, which I haven't purchased but I did read enough of the sample pages to find out what I had done wrong in my first attempt to sell used books. I tried selling fiction, novels, when I should have been selling Non-Fiction. Apparently, Publishers tend to over print fiction titles and there are always tons of extra copies around. Non-fiction titles are published in smaller batches, go out of print quicker, and are therefore more valuable from a used book point of view.

So I went to my local library sale, Friday, (which had halved the prices on all their books because they are getting ready to shut down for renovations). and bought seventeen hardback non-fiction titles for a total of $10.00. I have them listed on Amazon now, along with a few other books I had lying around the house. I did pretty good picking books - of those seventeen books which cost me $10.00, I'm listing one for $45.00, two others for $35.00 and $25.00 and most of the rest for between 5 and 10 dollars. Now I can actually make some money that way...