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Make Money Selling New Books
If you’ve dropped by my blog before, you know that I make money selling new and used books on Amazon as a way to earn my Mocha money. In my Sell Used Books on Amazon post, I list where I find some of my books. One place that I get books to sell that I didn’t mention is at Barnes & Noble. That’s right, I can walk into a Barnes & Noble store and come out with books that will put $30-$50 in my pocket. Not bad considering I only spend 20-30 minutes in the store!
Strategy
Let me clarify….this doesn’t happen all the time. The strategy for finding books to sell from Barnes & Noble is to frequently visit your local Barnes & Noble store. If you’ve visited your local B&N store, you’ve probably seen their large Clearance book section. There isn’t much money in contemporary fiction books so I stick to the nonfiction books. I also find better books on the bookshelves and not on the tables. However, you may want to check if there are stacks of books under the tables. Sometimes these books are clearance books AND signed by the author!
You should still check out the books on the Clearance tables even though I’ve only had limited success with these books. (I found a large Dale Carnegie book on a Clearance table that had three of his bestselling books compiled into one large book. I bought a bunch of these and made $5 per book and they sold really fast!).
You want to visit the store often because new books are added to the Clearance sections all the time.
How do you tell what a book is worth?
You need to have a cell phone with a data plan that includes internet to look up what a book is going for on Amazon. You can use the Amazon Seller’s app, or just go to Amazon’s website and enter the ISBN number listed on the back of the book into Amazon’s search field. Find out if Amazon is selling the book, and if so, at what price. The next thing you need to do is check out what price the Marketplace books are selling. These are the books that booksellers are selling either new or used. Your book will be new so you want to check out these prices.
You also want to look at the Product Details page and check out the book’s Amazon ranking. You want a low ranking in order for the book to sell fast. Anything under 50,000 should do OK in this situation. The higher the ranking, the longer the book will take to sell.
If your book looks like it is selling fast (i.e. has a low ranking) and you can make some money on it, then buy multiple copies of it if they are available. I’ll buy five or more copies of a book at a time if I think they’ll sell fast and I can make a profit.
Will you visit Barnes & Noble with a whole new mindset now? I bet you will!
Good practical advice for making money selling Barnes & Noble clearance books online. Selling new books should be much more lucrative than scouring garage sales and library sales for used books. I agree with the importance of checking in with the Amazon Marketplace to see what the book is selling for before you buy it. It helps give you confidence in the profitability given price you are paying and also with the ranking that it will sell.
Well i definitely did not know you could make money from Barnes and Noble. Next time i visit i will go with a different mindset. And as you said i will first check which books might sell fast on Amazon.
Your blog is really an eye opener. The used book market is an area that I never considered venturing into and you have made it seem possible. Thank you for sharing all that you have learned.
Wow, you have a lot of great ideas on your blog. Love your blog name/concept…very clever. My question is, when you sign up for these things, do you create a separate bank account? And what if they ask you for a Social (as I noticed on Amazon Associates)? Would you get a separate tax id# for your blogging earnings?
Yes. Get a separate business bank account. You will need to give your social security number to places such as Amazon if you want to be paid. You can get your own business tax id# if you are going to go full force as a business. If not, just use your S.S.#. Are you afraid to give it out over the internet? In your browser, make sure it says “https” and not just “http” on the page that asks for your S.S.#. If you’re still not sure, you can probably call the company and give your info over the phone.
Great idea! I too make a little income through Amazon but mostly just selling all the books we have around the house. But now that I have a G1 phone with a barcode scanner, it’s very easy to find how much books are selling for and I’ve been doing this long enough that I have a pretty good feel for which books to check first. I had been thinking about doing this with garage sales in the spring but no need to wait when I can visit B&N now!
Hi John,
I just got back from Barnes & Noble and bought six books to resale on Amazon. These books were selling at B&N for $4.98 each plus I get an extra 10% off with my discount card, and they are selling on Amazon for over $12.00. Now that’s obviously not a huge profit margin, but if I can make $7 per book (after Amazon takes their share and the extra dollar I make on shipping), then I just walked away with over $40. Not bad for less than an hour’s worth of “work!”