A good way to make extra money, and perhaps even a full-time living, is to sell used books through sites such as eBay and Amazon.

It’s particularly easy to enroll as a bookseller on Amazon.  Then you simply list the books you have for sale and how much you want for them.  When you sell a book, Amazon processes the customer’s payment and sends you the money.Your biggest work will involve packaging and shipping the book to your buyer in a timely manner.

If you are starting out as a seller on Amazon, there is one major mistake you should avoid – unless you are a masochist. Don’t try to sell bestsellers, at least if you are wanting to actually make money.

If you are like most used book sellers listing on Amazon, you will probably go to yard sales and hang out in thrift stores to acquire your stock. As a newbie you might think, “Ah, this book was a bestseller. That means it’s popular (or at least once was) so I will probably be able to sell it fast for a nice price.”  Wrong.

Former bestsellers and even very recent ones are a drag on the market. They probably enjoyed massive print runs, which means there are copies aplenty out there – and tons of copies available on Amazon itself.

As an experiment, I just looked up the first blockbuster that came to mind today: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt.  You might recall that this was a gigantic hit several years ago.

Anyway, at the time of my checking, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered for sale on Amazon.Also, 13 of those copies were listed for sale at just 1 cent each (plus shipping)!  With that kind of competition, do you expect someone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?

Instead of going for best sellers in your book hunts, try to locate books that didn’t sell many copies but that might appeal to a narrow audience. This means, too, that as a general approach you should stay away from fiction and stick with non-fiction.

The best way to run a business selling books on Amazon is to identify how much a used book will fetch before you take it home from the thrift store or yard sale. Nowadays, you can check this right there in the store (or at the yard-sale table) with a handheld device loaded with a special database and an attached barcode reader.

There is an excellent, downloadable ebook available over the Web that goes into detail on where and how to get hold of the necessary devices and database that will make your usdeb-book business truly efficient and profitable. You can read an independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go straight to the book’s web site to check it out.

There are also other ways to earn money selling books online. Four additional, and different, methods are outlined in this article.