@southern*sweet*tea wrote:
Books and sheet music are long tail items that can take A VERY LONG time to sell. You're selling to a limited buyer base of people looking for wants, not needs.
For books to sell and be profitable they need to be out of print and/or collectible in some way and you need to be able to find them for free or less than 50 cents to a dollar each. If it is or was a best seller within the past 30 years, you may be able to give it away for $3.98 with free shipping. I do have a few pieces of music listed, and I have sold a very few pieces of music over the past few months. It has to be - again - out of print and/or collectible in some way.
Books are a very, very tough sell in general. Most modern books are so mass-produced as to be virtually worthless (see: my local thrift store no longer accepting books because they had tubs and tubs of them that they couldn't even sell for a nickel each), and with older ones, unless you have certain editions/versions, most of them aren't worth that much either, like you said. About a year ago my father decided he was going to pare down his own book collection (things from the 50s-80s, all in good condition) and he was surprised to discover that almost nothing he had had any sort of value despite its age. He ended up taking almost all of it to a Friends of the Library bookstore and just donating it because it wasn't even worth the effort to try to sell for the amount he would get for it.
Now, I have a couple of paperbacks from the 90s that are worth $60+ each because they were small print runs and are now out of print. But finding stuff like that isn't easy BECAUSE they're rare. I only have them because I bought them back when I was a kid and then just stuck them on my bookshelf and forgot about them. The rest of my books? Not worth anything at all.
) cleaning projects to get done this week.
