Okay, let me get this out of the way.
The more you work this business, the more you can make.
The less you work… well, you know the drill.
There’s no income guarantee, but common sense will tell you that you can earn as much or as little as you like, based upon the work you do.
And if you love browsing thrift shops, rummage sales and so forth, you can have a blast doing it.
What am I talking about?
Buying books on the super cheap and then selling them for tidy profits on Amazon.
Yes, you’ve seen this before. Yes, there are loads of other people doing it. But do you know why there are loads of other people doing it?
Because it’s easy. It’s fun. It’s what I call an automatic money maker. And you never know when the next $100 treasure is going to pop up in the fifty cent book bin.

Books are:
• Cheap
• In plentiful supply
• Can be sourced from scores of different places
• They are constantly in demand
• People NEED them and value them
• They can provide a huge profit
• They are dead easy to pack and ship
• They are quite easy to store
• They hold a distinct fascination for buyers (desirability!)

Books are:
• Cheap
• In plentiful supply
• Can be sourced from scores of different places
• They are constantly in demand
• People NEED them and value them
• They can provide a huge profit
• They are dead easy to pack and ship
• They are quite easy to store
• They hold a distinct fascination for buyers (desirability!)

I really don’t think you can beat books for a product that’s in plentiful supply and is easy to source, store and sell.
There are hundreds of millions of used books out there and the majority are at prices so low you can just smell the profit.

You will never run out of books, and people don’t just stop buying books at certain times of the year, either. Books sell and sell constantly and consistently.
Do you have kids? They can do this business.
Do you have retired parents or grandparents looking for a profitable hobby? Turn them on to this business and they’ll get out of the house, have fun and make enough money to take trips and check things off their bucket lists.
But wait – is there any money to be made selling books?
You can bet your sweet behind there is.
Let’s say you go to a rummage sale. There you find stacks and stacks of books – yeah!
You look for certain books that you know fetch good prices. You pick out an entire stack of them. You show your big stack of books to the seller and you make them an offer.
9 times out of 10 they say YES! They just want to get rid of the things. Yes, they suspect some of them are worth good money, but they don’t know how to sell on Amazon – you do.

You take your stack of books home – let’s say there are 30 of them. You scan them in, get them listed online and forget about them.

And you do this on a regular basis. Pretty soon you’re got a few hundred books online, and a funny thing starts to happen.

You make sales.

Sometimes you make a BUNCH of sales, all in one day.

You check your email and… WOW! 7 sales today.

You print off the labels, pop the books in envelopes and post them, either by leaving them at your mailbox or dropping them off once a week at the post office.

A few weeks go by, you’re buying more books, selling more books, but you’re not paying attention to your numbers.

Hmmm, you better check and see how you’re doing.

Let’s say you’ve been really busy, and so far you’ve invested $500 in books.

For that $500, you’ve purchased 500 books (I’m going for the easy math here.)

You’ve made 50 sales, and likely cleared far more than your initial $500 investment.

As one bookseller posted on an Amazon forum, the average sale for many booksellers is around $20. Another seller confirmed that his average sales is $20, but that he will consider selling a book if he can charge at least $12.

Of course, how much you make per book will depend on which books you choose to sell and how much you charge.

You’ve sold 50 books and covered your expenses. But you still have 450 books in your inventory! Even if you stopped buying books at this point, you would continue to make sales and make money for some time to come.

Ryan Grant put himself through college using this method.

Except Ryan didn’t have time to hit the thrift stores and rummage sales, so instead, twice a year he would organize a text book buy back at his college.

He then sold those textbooks through Amazon, making up to $10,000 a year.
What’s really interesting about Ryan’s case is he only bought books twice a year. And after his first semester, he decided to let Amazon do the shipping for him, and he still cleared that much money.
Let’s address the Ebay vs Amazon issue.
Some folks will think Ebay is a better place to sell anything, including books.
I disagree. Amazon IS books. If you want a book, where do you go? Amazon. And so do most people. Who thinks to check eBay for a book?
More importantly is how the two sites are set up. If you are selling, “How to Kill a Mockingbird,” you make a listing on eBay for your book.
When someone searches on eBay for that book, they likely type in the title.
And what comes up?
As of this writing, 7,631 results!
What are the odds that someone – ANYONE – will even find your listing? And if they do find it, they will likely be so confused by the previous 10 or 50 or 100 listing they saw, they won’t know which copy to buy.
But on Amazon, all of the copies of a book are under ONE listing. You don’t have to generate your own page, your own description and all of that. You simply scan it, choose a price and state the condition and your book is listed.
And now people can find YOUR BOOK, because it’s right there with all of the others, listed according to price.
Yes, this does mean you have to be somewhat competitive on price, unless your edition is in very good or excellent shape, or it’s a first edition, or it’s signed.
Bottom line, if you want to get found and make sales, Amazon is the place to sell books.
One more reason to love Amazon: BSR. Best Seller Rankings are assigned to each and every product that has sold at least one unit on Amazon. The lower the BSR, the more sales the product makes.

For example, if a book has a BSR of 30,000, that means it’s likely to sell the same day you list it. But if it has a BSR of 2,500,000, it could take 60 days or more to sell the book.
Best Seller Ranking is your guide to whether or not a book is worth listing. Just as a guide rule, you might want to only list books that have a BSR lower than 200,000.
One last thing about Amazon – if you ever decide you don’t want to package and label books (which is brain dead easy, by the way) then you can ship your books to Amazon in bulk, and they will ship them to buyers as each one is sold. This is called Fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA.
Books sold through FBA tend to sell faster, because they can be sold with Prime shipping. However, you do pay more in fees.