Selling books is fun, and many people earn a living doing it online. I have had some success with all of the following.
1. Link to books on Amazon and receive commissions
If you have a web site, you can make money by linking from your pages to books and other items on Amazon.com.
You make money when someone clicks through from your link and makes a purchase on Amazon, which will pay you a commission.
You don't actually handle any books with this method. You just send people over to Amazon and collect a reward when they buy something.
You can link to any book on Amazon, but you should try to link to books related to the theme of your site.
For more information and to sign up, go to Amazon and look for a link to the "Associates Program."
2. Sell used books on Amazon and eBay
Some people make a full-time living with this.
First, find used books that you can buy inexpensively. Try thrift stores, yard sales, and your local library's annual book sale.
Next, list your book finds on Amazon. You should be able to sell them there for at least four or five times what you paid for them.
You can also sell books on eBay, but in my experience, it is better to use eBay only for collectible and rare books.
You will be responsible for packing and shipping the books you sell. Try to set up an efficient system for packing your books, weighing the packages, applying labels and postage and making trips to the post office.
You will also need to learn how to grade the conditions of your books so you can describe them accurately to potential purchasers.
3. Write and sell ebooks
Probably more people have made major money with this idea than with any of the others described here.
Write a book on a hot topic, convert it to a PDF file and offer it for sale over the web. "How-to" is by far the most popular and best-selling subject category.
Because your buyers download your ebook directly to their computers, you avoid most of the expenses associated with traditional book publishing. Most of the money you take in will be pure profit.
Of course, you must first write the book or "information product." There are a number of excellent guides available that show how to come up with an idea, research it, and then get your book down on paper--or "on screen" in this case.
Once you've created your ebook, you must gain your prospective buyers' attention and persuade them to purchase. This usually involves crafting and posting a good sales letter that will make people eager to whip out their credit cards.
4. Republish books that are in the public domain
Did you know that there are thousands and thousands of books and other printed works whose copyrights have expired? This means that anyone is free to republish them, in any form.
In the United States, most books published prior to 1923 are considered to be in the public domain ("PD").
If you find a public domain book that you think would sell well if it were republished, you could reprint it as a physical book. Or, you could publish it as an ebook and make it available for download, for a price.
Yet another method of "repurposing" PD books is to make them freely available on a web site, and then put advertising on their pages. I recommend a combination of Google AdSense and affiliate merchant ads (from sources such as Commission Junction).
To make use of this idea, you must of course find some PD works that you can republish and make money from. Several guides, and even a web-browser tool, have been published that can point you to a treasure trove of such works that are free for the taking.
5. Sell individual pages from books
This sounds like an odd way to make money, but it works.
You can often make more money by tearing a book apart and selling the individual pages than you can by selling the intact book.
The basic idea is, you scour old books and magazines for pictures, maps or advertisements that you can remove and offer for sale on eBay.
To be successful, you must learn which subjects sell well. For the right subject, people will go wild bidding for one page from a book that you might have paid only $2 or $3 for. Imagine the money you could make if that book has 10, 20 or 30 saleable pages in it!
Only a handful of people are using this method, and they're raking in the cash. In my opinion it's still a wide-open niche, with plenty of room for others to get in on it.
H. Tim Sevets is books editor for the Solid Gold Info Writers Consortium, specializing in objective reviews of the top money-making reports sold over the Web. His expanded article on ways to make money as an online bookseller is available here: http://www.solid-gold.info/5-ways-to-sell-books.html. |
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