Believe it or not, the micro-blogging site Twitter can actually be used for a more useful purpose than tweeting about what you had for lunch. There’s a couple ways that you can use it for your advantage for book selling – Twitter won’t revolutionize your business but it may help a bit.
In part 1, we will discuss how to use Twitter to find inventory. First, decide if you want to buy from local people only, or if you want to pay to have people ship their books to you via media mail.
If you decide to buy off of local people only, do a search of your city name in the search bar on the right side of Twitter. This will bring up any tweets of your city and there is a good chance that these people live in your city – follow them. Then, go to “Find People” in Twitter and type in your city name in there. Follow these people who have your city name in their nicknames as they probably live in your city as well. Do this over the next few weeks and you should get a good number of followers from your local area.
In your profile, add a description that says something about your interest in buying books (and what kind, year, if applicable). I think my profile says – “I will buy your unwanted books”.
If you decide that you will buy books from people from anywhere and pay for shipping, then you will have an easier time. Just type in words like “book(s)”, “book selling”, “college”, and “make money” into both of the search bars mentioned above. You should be able to get a steady stream of followers who may want to sell their books to you in no time.
Once you have some followers, post periodic tweets about your interest in buying books. I usually tweet something like, “Need extra CASH? I buy books – any genre – direct message me for more details”.
I’ve gotten a few messages this way about books and have found a few people locally that I’ve bought from as well. I hope this helps you get started using Twitter as another source for acquiring inventory – in part 2 I will show you how to use Twitter to help sell your books!
If you are just starting out in the online book selling business and are wondering where to start looking for inventory – library book sales are the answer. With spring approaching there are going to be thousands of them all over the country and there will probably be some close to your home. When you are at your local library ask them if they have a book sale and when it is – most major libraries have at least 2 a year. You can also check the site BookSaleFinder.com to search for sales in your area or to find big sales that you would like to travel to.
Many booksellers believe that the key to finding great inventory is to attend the “preview” sale – usually the night before the public sale begins. To attend the preview sale you need to be a FOL (Friend of the Library). You can usually become a member at the door for a nominal fee of $10-$30 a year. You will more than cover the cost of the fee with the books you find at this preview sale. If you are new to book selling the preview sale might be a little overwhelming as you will be competing with other booksellers and there will be thousands of books to choose from.
I always attend the preview sales at library sales but this year I am trying a new strategy since I am listing most of my books with Amazon Fulfillment now. With Amazon Fulfillment, I am more concerned with the speed a book is going to sell over the amount of money the book will sell for. The beauty of this is that you can actually make money selling every day run-of-the-mill paperbacks. With this in mind, I am starting to put more emphasis on attending the final day of the library sale when the books are at their cheapest… many times they are a dollar a bag. You can still find fast selling books of low value on the last day that your competing book sellers don’t care about.
If you want to look into the Amazon FBA program more – check out the ebook Book to the Future. This ebook is short and simple and shows you how to make money right away with FBA!
If you sell books online you know that you need a lot of inventory and you need it CHEAP. My main source of inventory is thrift shops where books are typically 50 cents for paperbacks and $1 for hardbacks. Even these prices can seem high if your low on cash or if you need to acquire a large amount of books fast. This week I stumbled upon a great hidden source of books – storage units.
I saw an ad on my local Craigslist that a storage unit company had cleaned out their old unpaid units are were selling off several items including books. I went to check it out the next morning and was kind of disappointed. They wanted $1 a book and most of it was just junk. I bought maybe $10 worth of books but left my # with them and told them if they find more books and just want to get rid of them to give me a call. They called me a few days later and said to come by and pick up all of their books and just pay what I felt was appropriate. I went there and filled up my SUV with books for about $40. I just started going through them but have already covered my $40 just with the first few boxes I went through.
If your needing some inventory you may just want to walk into the local storage unit facilities and introduce yourself. Best of all, with all of the worthless books you get you can donate them to the library for a tax write off!
