As you may have seen, I haven’t kept up my normal blogging schedule of every 2-3 days as of late and wanted to drop a quick post to let you guys know why.  If you keep up with the blog and my Youtube videos where you can subscribe to on the sidebar, you’d noticed that I had purchased about 20,000 books from a book sale a few weeks ago.  I also posted some videos in my last post from a Friends of the Library sale.  I got the leftovers from this sale last year and managed to come to a deal to get the leftovers again this year which came out to a little over 10,000 books even though they raised the price on me $150.  Oh well, I made over $10K on last years.  HEHE!

If you’re paying attention, that comes to 20,000 books purchased two weekends ago and now another 10,000 purchased last weekend.  I’ve already been through about half of them, which comes out to spending every single weekday evening fulfilling orders and listing books along with spending 10-12 hours every weekend day listing.  It’s been a very busy few weeks not including my full time job.  It’s getting to the point now where I might just run out of space in my little warehouse which has made me think about growing my thriving little online bookselling business and taking out a small business loan to put on an addition.  I’ll keep everyone updated on that front.

So, I guess you could call this an excuse post but you can call it whatever you want.  I’m focusing 100% of my efforts on online bookselling and not writing about it at this point and plan to come back to the blog 100% after this initial influx of new inventory is done.  I’m still working on an updated version of my eBook and have a video series in the works but currently have no timeframe on that.

If you’re new to online bookselling, you’ll have times like these.  You might not bite off quite as much as I typically do but if you ever buy books by the thousands and have to evaluate, price and list thousands at a time, you’ll understand how much of a time drain it is especially if you’re a one man show like I am.  If you’ve been selling books online for some time, you might know where I’m coming from or you might be the type to simply pick and choose at sales and do not have this problem.

There are a ton of different ways you can accumulate books to sell online and my favorite way is to by books in bulk for cheap and typically list 30% of them while discarding the rest by either selling to brick and mortar bookstores or by donating them and taking the tax writeoff.   Your method may be different than mine because everyone in this business is a little different.

Now it’s your turn!  How do you get your book inventory to sell online?  Do you buy by the thousands like I do or do you take your scanner to booksales and spend a few hours to get first dibs?  Let me know your experiences!