Packing Tips for Selling Books Online

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Molly Mackey with Expert Village and today we’re going to talk about common mistakes when starting out in book buying. One of the most common mistakes is running across something of a classic and it looks old and you think, well wow this is valuable. Well no, what you want to do is really make sure that you do your homework and your research and find out the publishers’ that are going to be interesting. So many of these classics, like this Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, is a book club and yeah, it may be old from the 1940’s but it has no value whatsoever. So classic literature like The Catcher in the Rye, even with a dust jacket it’s got to be a really, really early printing or edition. So you want to skip those. Another mistake is walking into a estate sale, seeing a huge collection of books, letting your greed take over and missing things like, you get them home and perhaps the owner loved to mark in them, highlight pages, there’s water damage, maybe, you know all kinds of damage, musty odors a lot of times in estate sales. So you want to really keep your head and check those things before you make your purchase and get out the door. Lastly another thing is paying too much for books. If you’re in an estate sale, I can tell you right now, estate dealers, they do not like books, they want to get rid of them, so just try to offer them as little as possible. I try to stay around fifty, but fair to them, fifty cents to a dollar a hardback. They are happy to get rid of them, if there are a lot of books that you like, make them an offer on the whole set, get them out of there and what you don’t need is fine, you’re going to make money on the rest. "