As someone who likes to sell books online through both Amazon.com and textbook buyback companies, I know there are advantages and disadvantages to selling through both of these venues.

In this post, I’d like to share what I think are the top reasons for selling gold dust books to book buyback companies to make extra money.

1. Gold Dust Books Don’t Create Clutter!

It’s a common hazard for any online book dealer; to sell books online successfully you have to build up a large inventory of books – which usually means sacrificing a spare bedroom or garage to store all of those books. For someone trying to sell books out of a dorm room or whose wife despises clutter, this can be a huge problem.

But not with gold dust books! Because you can immediately sell gold dust books, you can buy a hundred books; sell them online that night; and then pack and ship them out the next day. With this kind of rapid turnaround, your books won’t stay in your house long enough to create any clutter!

Additionally, you can declutter your house of any books you already have by visiting Bookscouter.com, entering the ISBNs of any books you want to get rid of, and checking if any book buyback company will offer you a good price quote for them.

Bear in mind that once you sell your books, you’ll want to pack them up and ship them out fast (the next day if possible!). You don’t want boxes of books cluttering up your house when they could be out making you extra money!

2. Gold Dust Books Are Easier to Find!

For the book scout who limits his or her search to books that sell online for $20 or more, book scouting can be frustrating. Other book scouts may have already picked over all the books and if your favorite thrift store hasn’t put out any new merchandise, you can leave the store empty-handed.

Not so with gold dust books! Where high profit books are often in short supply (why do you think they’re worth so much in the first place?) gold dust books are usually much easier to find.

This is because gold dust books are not only in great demand but are also produced in mass quantities. The downside to this is that each book may only sell for $2 or $3 to a book buyback company. The upside is that, since they’re more plentiful, you’ll have a much easier time of finding them.

Personally, I’ve never walked out of a thrift store empty-handed. Like all book scouts, I have good days (where I load up my car with close to two hundred books) and bad days (where I walk out of a thrift store with only five or six gold dust books), but on average all of my book scouting trips are profitable.

Better yet, once you start selling gold dust books, you’ll find you sell the same titles again and again – meaning you can spot these gold dust book titles easily on a book shelf.

A word of caution – sometimes even a book title you’ve sold dozens of times to book buyback companies can stop receiving price quotes for a few weeks or months. This might happen when the book buyback companies get overstocked with the title and need to sell their inventory before buying any new copies.

So make sure to scan your books and check all the price quotes through Bookscouter before you buy them! The last thing you want is to get stuck with a bunch of books you can’t sell!

3. Gold Dust Books Help Build Up an Inventory of High Profit Books!

This reason might sound strange at first. After all, most of the gold dust books you’ll find will only sell for $2 or $3 to a book buyback company.

But not all of them. Often, you’ll find a gold dust book that might only sell for $10 to a book buyback company, but can be listed for as much as $50 or $80 on Amazon or eBay.

This can happen for one of two reasons. Sometimes a book is in high demand and a book buyback company wants to snatch it up for a bargain price so it can re-sell it for a higher profit. New editions of textbooks often fall into this category.

In other cases, the book might not be in high demand, but is in short supply. These books might be considered collector’s items and/or may have a niche following. Such books take time to sell, but can sell for high prices if they find the right buyer.

Either way, it’s to your advantage to check and see if your gold dust book might also be a high profit book you can sell on Amazon. Be sure to read my post, How to Sell Your Gold Dust Books Online for the Best Prices and learn how you can sign up for a free Bookscouter account that will inform you of all your options.

Update: I’ve recently published a very popular eBook, Pricing Used Books for Profit on Amazon, which gives you an effective step-by-step strategy for pricing your high-end books competitively on Amazon — and how to keep them competitively priced (often by raising your prices). If you’d like to learn more, feel free to check it out!

4. Gold Dust Books Provide a Regular Supplemental Stream of Income

This is, in my opinion, the best reason to sell gold dust books online.

Most people want to sell books online to generate a regular stream of income. For a rookie book scout, however selling books though only Amazon or eBay can be difficult. You need to build up a large inventory and even then, you can experience dry spells where you won’t sell a lot of books.

This is why it’s important to have an alternate stream of income that can help you pay the bills as you build up your online bookselling business. If you sell gold dust books on a constant basis, you’ll soon receive regular Pay Pal payments that will not only cover your book buying expenses but also provide revenue for personal expenses.

Keep in mind that, as in any business, you’ll experience highs and lows with selling gold dust books as well. On certain months, you’ll find it’s very easy to find hundreds of gold dust books and sell them for high prices. On other months, you’ll find gold dust books are in shorter supply and don’t receive the same high price quotes they used to.

To make sure you keep making money, you need to diversify where and how you buy your gold dust books – something I’ll cover in future posts.

The other thing to realize is that if you not only sell books online through Amazon and eBay but to book buyback companies as well, you’ll soon have multiple streams of income coming in – which will earn you a lot more extra money in the long run.

Final Thoughts

If someone asked me whether they should sell their books on either Amazon or to book buyback companies, my answer would be simple.

Sell them on both!

Selling books online doesn’t have to be an either/or business. Amazon and book buyback companies are both valid places to sell books – and as you learned in this post, you can regularly find gold dust books that sell better on Amazon than to a book buyback company.

And while it’s true that you can usually sell books faster by sending them to a book buyback company, there are strategies you can use to sell books fast on Amazon as well.

If you’d like to learn more about how to sell your books faster and earn more money on Amazon, please check out my Sell Books Fast Online eBook series.

And if you’d like to learn how gold dust books can earn you thousands of dollars a year, check out my post How to Make Extra Money Every Day By “Flipping” Books Online

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