What Are the Best Books to Sell Online to Book Buyback Companies?

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will go over various book subjects and/or genres and let you know which buyback companies will offer you good prices for them if you sell them online.

Please note that before selling your books online to a buyback company, you should always check the company’s policies on the condition your books must be in to make sure they will accept your books and pay you the promised price quote. Remember – some buyback companies will pay handsomely for a book with highlighting and notes, while others will reject them flat out. Make sure you know the company polices!

With that said, here are my thoughts on how much extra money you can earn for bestsellers and graphic novels.

Bestsellers

These type of books (which can include top selling thrillers and literary fiction) are a mixed bag that can range from highly desirable to completely worthless.

The reason for this lies in the nature of bestsellers – because they’re so popular, publishers print a lot of copies (millions of copies if you’re a hot author like Stephen King).

On one hand, this is great since these books are easy to find in thrift stores a few months after their initial release. If the hype for these books is still high, you can expect to earn a nice profit on such books (I’ve personally bought recent bestsellers for $1 and sold them for $8 a few hours later).

On the other hand, this large supply leads to rapid depreciation once demand for these books cools and stores are left with thousands of books very few people want.

When selling to buyback companies though, this depreciation can slow somewhat since some buybacks can still reach interested readers. Most buybacks won’t offer you a ton of money for outdated bestsellers ($2 to $5 a book is fairly typical), but they will often offer more than you can get by selling them on Amazon.com.

(Plus, since most bestsellers continue to depreciate over time, it’s to your advantage to sell them fast – which usually means selling to a buyback company.)

When selling bestsellers, I recommend you sell to Powells Books (if the book is in excellent shape) as they buy more popular fiction than any other buyback company I’ve dealt with. There’s an excellent chance Powells will offer you a nice quote for the stack of bestsellers you just finished reading (especially if they’re still recent releases) so feel free to visit their website, enter the ISBNs of your books, and see what they’re offering.

Another buyback company I recommend for selling bestsellers to is Sell Back Your Book. This company also requests that the books you send them be in very good condition, but I’ve rarely had them reject any of the books I’ve sent them (Powells, on the other hand, has been known to deny me payment on a few books they deem below their book condition standards) so I send them several packages of books every month.

Graphic Novels

Graphic novels run a pretty wide gamut these days. Aside from the collections of superhero comic books that most people think of, you have collections of popular newspaper comic strips, English translations of Japanese manga comics, comic book adaptations of popular novels, and completely original works.

When selling graphic novels, it helps if you know something about the books you’re selling online. If you like reading comic books and/or are a fan of Japanese manga, you probably have an idea of which books are popular and which have a small fan base.

If you’re not already well-versed in graphic novels, I still recommend you take the time to quickly scan the ISBN barcodes of these books (preferably with your Bluetooth Cordless Hand Scanner) if you find a bunch of them at a thrift store for a low price.

Over time, you’ll learn to separate the high selling graphic novels from the less valuable ones – and know which graphic novel characters are popular (even if you don’t read their stories yourself!)

So how much can you earn from selling graphic novels online to buyback companies? I’ve found some superhero graphic novels can sell for as much as $15, while popular manga comics can go as high as $20!

(That said, I’ve noticed manga tends to be less popular than superhero comics overall, so everything else being equal – I tend to favor superhero graphic novels).

Once again, I recommend checking out Powells Books and Sell Back Your Book as they both enjoy buying popular fiction. (If you have some graphic novels you want to get rid of, you can even check their prices right now from your computer by visiting these websites).

I also recommend you check out Cash 4 Books as they’ve occasionally offered me the best price on a graphic novel (plus they usually pay really fast).

I hope this helps you in your search for more profitable books to sell online! Feel free to comment, and if you’d like to be informed of more blog entries in this series, please subscribe to my blog. We’ll be covering a lot more popular book subjects over the next few weeks (as well as subjects and genres that don’t sell well to buybacks) so stay tuned!

Websites Like Bookscouter

Laptop and Books RESIZED

As many of you have probably noticed, I promote Bookscouter a lot in my blog. There’s a reason for this – Bookscouter is hands down, the best buyback company comparison website I’ve ever seen. No other website (that I know about) compares as many buyback company price quotes (up to 57 buyback vendors as of now!) as Bookscouter.

Even better, if you sign up for a free account with Bookscouter, you can choose which buyback company price quotes show up on your searches – and also get real time price quotes from Amazon.com as well. Pretty cool for a free website!

That said, there are other websites and free apps like Bookscouter that also showcase prices from buyback companies, and I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with them and become prepared to use them when you go out looking for books to sell online.

Why? Well, for one thing, while Bookscouter is normally reliable, it does experience an occasional glitch from time to time. Once while I was searching for books to sell online, I was thrilled to see that one (and only one) buyback company was offering over $40 for a book I just scanned. My elation turned to confusion, however, when I saw Bookscouter telling me that the same buyback company was offering $40 for every book I scanned.

A quick check at the actual buyback company’s website confirmed it – there was an error in the price check and the company wasn’t offering anything for the books I had scanned. I quickly returned the books I scanned to their shelves – but I would have wasted a lot of money if I’d bought them.

On other (rare) occasions, Bookscouter can temporarily shut down due to some maintenance issue. These issues usually resolve themselves in a few hours, but it can be frustrating if you’re out bookscouting and can’t use the website to compare buyback company prices.

When these problems come up, it’s to your advantage to have some backup websites and apps ready to turn to so you can at least find a few books to sell to buyback companies until Bookscouter resolves its issues.

Here are some “back up” websites and apps that I suggest you study up on:

Bookfinder

Bookfinder is an ecommerce search engine that helps people find books they want at good prices. More importantly for you, however, it has a feature on its website that compares buyback price quotes.

Bookfinder doesn’t compare anywhere near the number of buyback companies Bookscouter does (as of now it only compares seven – Textbooks.com, TextbookRush, Abe Books, Amazon.com, eCampus.com, Bookbyte, and Valore) but it does allow for some comparison buyback shopping if you’re in a pinch.

One cool feature about this website is that you can enter multiple ISBNs from the books you’re checking and then have the website show prices for all the books simultaneously (as opposed to looking them up one by one).

Overall, I prefer Bookscouter to Bookfinder – but I’m glad I can turn to Bookfinder if I need to.

Sell Back Your Book App

This is a free app for your Android or iPhone that you can download off of the Sell Back Your Books website.

Sell Back Your Books is one of my favorite buyback companies to sell to. They offer competitive prices and only have a $5 minimum buyback order (meaning they need to offer you a price quote of at least $5 for all of your books before you can finalize your buyback order and send out your books).

The downside to this app is – you guessed it – it only gives you price quotes from Sell Back Your Books and not any other buyback companies.

Nevertheless, Sell Back Your Books does offer good price quotes for a lot of books (I recently made almost $50 just by selling them six books – check them out to see if you can sell any of your books to them!) and you should definitely download their app in case of an emergency.

Cash 4 Books App

This is another free Android and iPhone app offered by another buyback company I sell to on a regular basis – Cash 4 Books. Like Sell Back Your Books, Cash 4 Books has a minimum buyback order of $5, and their buyback prices are usually so high that it’s very easy to sell books to them (I frequently sell buyback packages to them in excess of $25).

To top it off, Cash 4 Books frequently emails special bonus codes to people who open a free account with them that increases their already substantial price quotes.

Again, the downside to this app is that it only offers price quotes from Cash 4 Books. Even so this is a good buyback company that will offer good prices for any books you choose to sell to them, so the app is definitely worth downloading. (You can find it on Cash 4 Books main page under “Quick Links” “Mobile Apps with Barcode Scanner”).

Buyback Company Websites

If you don’t want to download apps and prefer looking up prices online, you can always go directly to a buyback company’s website and look up price quotes if the Bookscouter website is down and/or experiencing a glitch.

The only issue with this method is that it’s too time consuming to check a bunch of different websites against a single book. You could be scanning for hours and only find a small number of books you can sell online to buyback companies.

To combat this problem, you’ll want to limit your search to buyback companies that accept a lot of books and offer competitive price quotes for them.

Again, I suggest you visit the Sell Back Your Books and Cash 4 Books websites when searching in this way.

I would also suggest you visit the Powells Books website and see if you can sell any of your books there. Powells doesn’t always offer the highest price quotes – but they do accept a lot more books than most buyback companies, and will pay quickly.

A word of caution – Powells only accepts books in excellent condition (i.e. no highlighting, markings, tears, or ex-library books) so be sure to inspect your books carefully before selling to them.

Final Thoughts

When selling books online – especially when selling them to buyback companies – it’s to your advantage to compare price quotes from as many buyers as possible to ensure you’re getting a good deal. For this, Bookscouter can help you like no other website.

Nevertheless, when Bookscouter isn’t available, you should always have some backup online resources so you don’t end up wasting your valuable time at a thrift shop or library sale. Visit the websites and download the apps listed above, and you’ll be in a better position to make a profit even when the unexpected happens.

By the way, if you know of any additional websites and/or apps that work similar to Bookscouter, please feel free to comment below. And, as always, please subscribe to my blog for more tips on making extra money by selling books online quickly!