Answer: I’ve been getting a lot of questions about where to buy and sell books and I’ve been showing friends how to do it. The best place to sell books is pretty obvious to most but it’s Amazon. Amazon makes it the easiest in my opinion and your most likely to get the highest gross price compared to your local bookstore, eBay, or Craigslist.
Even with the $1 listing fee and 15% commission. Here is how to sell your books on Amazon. Let us know if you have questions.
If the book has an ISBN barcode on the back or you at least if you know what the ISBN, there are only two required fields that you need to fill out the listing. If you have an Amazon account you also automatically have a Seller account.
All you have to do to set it up is enter your bank account information.
Once that’s done it’s time to start listing some books. Click Seller Account, on that screen go to inventory and click on “Add A Product”
You will get to a screen where you need to search for the book by the ISBN as I mentioned above.
There maybe a couple of different listings. Match the one that looks like the cover of the book and click “Sell Yours”. What your are doing is called listing against the existing Amazon catalog.
This is where a lot of my friends got mixed up. They thought they had to create a whole new listing which takes at least a half an hour for someone with my skill level and longer for a novice. Here, as you see there are only two required fields, the price and the condition. I also tell my friends to fill out the optional Condition Note. Truthfully!
Used books sell faster when you are honest and sound like you took a minute to fill out the condition. Most copies of the book you are competing against are canned auto filled notes, so yours will stand out.
For Condition, I always under-grade a step to prevent returns. You should too. So it you think the book is “Like New” grade it “Very Good” and so forth.
Once you make a choice it will reveal the current low price. If you describe the condition in the condition notes, I tell them to price it $2 or $3 dollars higher than the low price. The fact you described your copy makes it more comfortable for the buyer, what they are getting. If it’s a textbook and the low price is like $25 or something, take a minute to go to a website called camelcamelcamel.com which will tell you what they book has sold for on Amazon. It may be double or even triple the low price suggestion.
Then add the “Quantity” which is 1. Then all you have to do is scroll down and change the Shipping Method from “ I want Amazon to ship and provide customer service for my items if they sell, ” to ” I want to ship this item myself to the customer if it sells.”
Uncheck all the other Shipping choices except 4-14 days, which you can’t un-check and click ‘Save and Finish”
And presto, you wait for Amazon to email you when it’s sold. You can make more money when you sell a book yourself than selling it to your bookstore.
Keep in mind that Amazon isn’t magical. You notice in the fourth screen shot above something called “Amazon Sales Rank.” In this case the book I used as an example is ranked 3774. That is very popular!
If your book has a Sales Rank of 2 million it’s going to take awhile to sell and if it’s 10 million, it may never sell. Your best off donating it because your local book buyer ain’t going to buy it either. Sales Rank is like gold, the lower the better.
Let us know if you have questions about details.