First off, I want to say how excited I am about this month.  This is yet another record month for me, but it didn’t come without it’s hardships and extreme amount of work.  Here’s what it looked like this month.

Here are 3 few observations that I made:

1. I sold a lot of books, but not necessarily at a high price.

There are 2 ways to make money selling books online.  You can sell a lot of books for next to nothing *cough* penny book sellers *cough* or you can sell a few books for a lot more.  I sold a whopping 564 items this month.  The month’s average book sale was a little over $9/book.  Compare that to May’s average book value at over $16/book.  Even though I made $500 more this month I sure worked a lot harder!  If you simply don’t have the time to fulfill orders, think twice before you list that book for $1.50.  Would you be better off just donating it?

2. I spent a considerable amount of time away from home.

With this many orders and the amount of books I had to go through in order to find these books I spent a considerable amount of time at my little warehouse.  The time incurred doing this was processing that big load of 25,000+ books that I purchased earlier.  I choose to buy in huge bulk and go through them instead of going to the sales with my scanner in hand and picking and choosing.  However, could I have actually spent a day or so at this sale and came out with the same amount of books that I had to go through thousands to find?  I don’t know.  Decide if you want to know what you buy beforehand or buy in bulk and price later.

3. I decided to recruit help.

Having a full time job just squeezes my time even more. I typically only have time during the evenings to fulfill orders and answer customer service issues.  The only time I can price and list books is on the weekends.  I’m sure I could have eventually got everything done but not in this sort of time frame.   I decided to employ my cousin to help me.   It is a perfect gig for her because her kids and husband are off the school during the day and she loves books.  She’ll also work for pretty cheap so that I can actually afford her!  My mother was also able to help as well some so if you can get family to either help for free or for cheap, recruit them!

I hope that my monthly sales reports help you in seeing what kind of money that you can make in this business.  I’ve said it before, you can make as much money as you want by selling books on the Internet but you just have to put the work in to do it.  That’s why I love doing this so much.  I write my own paycheck every month!  I also hope that you can take away some ideas from the monthly lessons I learn and adapt them to your business.