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How to make $$$ from penny books again!
Category selling-more-books
There comes a time in an online book business when you come across an undiscovered jewel; a service that has the potential to monetize those books that you were once treating as junk. You know what I’m talking about! I’m talking about the penny books that we all know and love. These are the books that if we take a glimpse of another mass market paperback romance novel, a 90s fiction hardcover novel or an older Dr. Phil book we want to scream! These kinds of books wreak terror in a bookseller’s eyes.
The last time I had a revelation like this it was from Amazon’s FBA program. At the time, I was so excited that I could finally make some money off of these penny books. However, I soon found out that others had the same idea as well and thus began the FBA offers’ spiral to penny book status which brought about FBA offers going for $2.75 and less; NEGATIVE reward if you do the math!
I was elated to again hear about another service that wouldn’t completely allow me to sell off these books but did offer a source that has made me around $250 this month. That’s not bad considering these are books that are not feasible to sell via merchant-fulfilled or with FBA. This service is called Bookscouter.com and has become a pillar in my inventory receiving process.
Bookscouter.com is a site that aggregates a huge number of sites that will buy back used books. Brandon, the owner, has popular sites like Powells and Textbooks.com to obscure sites such as Blue Rocket Books. Simply scan an ISBN in one spot and in a few seconds all of these sites will bring up their quotes for you to link over to the buyer’s site. The best thing about these sites is that it’s GUARANTEED cash so you have no waiting around for a sale.
For all you guys that have been with me for a long time now you might remember the post I did back in July of 09 about buyback sites. I was quite adamant about how I disliked them mostly because I wasn’t in the position where I am now with tens of thousands of penny books being discarded. And still so, a service like this still may not be beneficial to the smaller bookseller that only purchases high dollar books because these sites will typically only give you the price in which they can still make money.
The only drawback I have seen to this service (which isn’t bookscouter.com’s fault) is that these sites are VERY picky about condition. Books that you might have sold on Amazon as good condition and the customer being pleased as punch you would never get away with the book buyback sites. They are offering cash for only top quality books which makes it a little more difficult but considering every one of these books were getting tossed aside to be sold for nothing it’s still a great service.
Have you found a new and exciting way like I have to make more money from your online business? If so, what is it and how did you come across it? If not, why not? If you can take yourself out of the day-to-day humdrum of scanning books and think a little bit I’m positive you’d be able to come across one!
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