It’s incredibly easy to register as a bookseller on Amazon.  Once joined, you simply list the books you have for sale and how much you are asking for them.  When you sell a book, Amazon processes the customer’s payment and forwards you the money.Your biggest work will involve packaging and shipping the book to your buyer in a timely manner.

When you are beginning as an Amazon seller, there is one common newbie mistake you are well advised to avoid. Don’t try to sell bestsellers, at least if you are wanting to actually make money.

If you follow the usual pattern of new Amazon booksellers, you’ll likely go to yard sales and spend time in thrift stores acquiring your stock. As a novice you might think, “This book was a best seller. That means it’s popular (or at least once was) so I should be able to sell it fast for a pretty good profit.”  Wrong.

Former bestsellers including even very recent ones are a drug on the market. They probably had huge print runs, which means there are copies by the gazillion out there – and tons of copies for sale 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 incredible hit several years ago.

Anyway, at the time of my checking, there were 245 used copies of Midnight being offered on Amazon.And, 13 of those copies were priced at a mere penny each (plus shipping)!  With that kind of glut, do you expect anyone is going to pay you more than a few cents for your copy?

Instead of grabbing up best sellers in your book searches, try to find books that didn’t sell very many copies but that might appeal to a specialized 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 bring before you take it home from the thrift store or yard sale. It is now possible to check this right in the store (or at the yard sale) using an inexpensive hand-held device loaded with a special database and with an attached barcode reader.

There is an excellent, downloadable ebook available 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. There’s 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 learn more.

There are many other ways to profitably sell books online. Four additional, and different, methods are described in this article.