bookselling: when you make your money

One of the first lessons gleaned from the wisdom of the boss was this:

You make your money when you buy the book, not when you sell the book.

The point being that knowing what you're doing and getting stuff for the right price is the key to successful bookselling.

Today's example:

I'm cleaning out my listing nook and came across a stack of needlework & quilting books I picked up at a thrift store a while back.  They're all thin little staplebound booklets, not something I usually bother with as they're hard to merchandise in a store (books without spines = giant pains in the ass) and I don't know enough about the subject to sift the good from the bad.  50 cents each is more than I'm willing to spend on pure speculation.

But on this particular day the thrift store was having a bag sale- five bucks for everything you can stuff in a grocery bag.  Suddenly all those weird, super thin craft pamphlets were VERY enticing- they took up very little space and I was pretty sure at least a couple of them would be good for Amazon, I just didn't know which.    50 cents each was too much, but $5 a bag was Can't Lose.

I filled up a grocery bag with regular books, then slid 30 or so of the needlework booklets in along the four sides.  $5 a bag, my money was already made, the only question was how large a profit I'd be taking.

Having just finished checking them all over, there was one really good one ($20), a couple of pretty good ones ($5) and a few that were worth listing mainly because they weight next to nothing and you can ship them cheap- list for $2-3 and make an extra buck on Amazon's shipping stipend.

All told, $40 worth of listings, at least $30 of which will sell.

And that's how you make your money when you buy the books.