Have Fun and Make Money Selling Books on Amazon.Com

Have Fun and Make Profit Selling Books on Amazon.Com Lex Loeb Contributor Network . I live in Portland , Oregon and we have the resource of Powell's books to sell books for a reasonable price fast and easy right here in town. I started to dispose of my library of books by taking them to Powell's and found they were buying around 5 to 10 percent of what I offered them. I would put boxes and boxes in my car and go down to sell books and often did come out with a reasonable amount of money for the books they wanted. The option of selling at Powell's remains. I met a friend that told me that anyone can set up a book store on Amazon and quickly tried it. It is kind of fund entering code numbers of books and finding the place to sell them, entering the condition of the book and a price and later having it sell. It turns out that selling higher priced books on Amazon is a better deal than lower price books. Amazon creates a market place with a lot of competition . Many sellers seem to be charging just one cent for a book. Without some special mailing rate beyond the media rate from the US Post office which is the cheapest way I have found to mail out books sold one is unlikely to net more than a quarter for a book on Amazon. Recently postal rates went up but Amazon allowances for postage did not go up so I have find that pricing a book at less than $2 is not the best idea unless it can go for a lower postal rate than media rate. Selling a $2 book with the present amazon.com shipping allowance nets less than $1.12 before paying for packaging. If I routinely sell more than $40 in books a month, which I may or may not I can buy a store front there and pay lower commissions to amazon for $40 a month. I don't want to expand to a full time business but I do now have too many books listed there. My store is called UFO Museum and maybe you can find it to see my wide array of listings. Books only stay up 6 weeks before the listing has to be renewed and that has become a major chore to consider. Paying the extra $40 a month makes the listing permanent without having to re-list. Re listing gives me a chance to reprice the books so they might sell at a more discounted price later and that is one advantage for all the work. As time has gone on doing this for almost a year now. I have books piled up in stacks to the top of my computer on the desk in the computer room that I removed from bookshelves and it gets harder and harder to find the books that sell because I never bothered to put any in alphabetical order. At some point it seems that my Amazon book shop is going to come crashing down on me not literally but physically. It is hard to believe how many books have piled up even with a nice percentage selling. It just takes time till someone needs a particular book. Some books are rare and sell for more than others when they do and not until. As time as progressed I have become more of a robot working for Amazon.com than I might like to be. The advantages still seem to out number the disadvantages. I also can sell other items on Amazon. I have successfully sold fresh chestnuts from our farm last year. Most of our chestnuts sell on ebay but I got tired of the auction format and wanted to try a fixed price at a reasonable fee. Amazon has that advantage over Ebay. I was surprised when I found I could sell fresh Asian pears, fuyu persimmons and fresh chestnuts nationwide on Ebay when i first started. This allowed me to completely give up on the hassle of selling those things in local farmers markets. To open an account to sell on amazon or a complete store Just go to Amazon.com and look at seller information and register. It costs nothing to start and is a great way to unload your old unwanted books. At some point I may just have to shut my amazon store all at once and start taking boxes to Powell's again. As it happens Powell's, itself has a very large online store on Amazon besides their own at www.powells.com. my little computer room bookstore can in no way compete with powells for books in terms of selection. My customer service might be better selling just a few books a day however. The bigger my UFO Museum amazon store inventory gets the more likely it will at some point become "temporary" or I could rent a space downtown in Portland and open an actual bookstore but then I become a book store owner and I have to run the book store 24/7 so maybe not. I am thinking of raising the price of all the books i sell there as a means to fund the Museum with a disclosure statement because I might rather be running the UFO Museum again than running a book store. Charity fund raising books for Starving Aliens--what a concept. Maybe not. Put that idea in the X-files? .