Selling all your stuff

[m741]

So, let's say I've got somewhere around 1000 books that I've accumulated over the years, and I want to sell 95% of them. I'd like to sell them over ~9 months, so it's not urgent. Any ideas?

I can donate them, and have been donating a fair amount over the past 2-3 years, especially cheap paperbacks, classics, scifi, etc. The stuff I've got left is probably worth at least a buck or two each, and some probably worth 5-$10, so in the end it's worth a reasonable amount.

I looked at selling on Amazon (Fulfillment by Amazon), but it seems to be a lot of effort + fees to sell stuff. Plus transporting it to a UPS is obnoxious without a car.

Craigslist doesn't seem very well suited for selling books. At least, I've never desired to shop for books there.

Anyone got other alternatives or suggestions?

[inchicago]

I had about the same amout of books about 10 years ago and sold most of them through Amazon. The ones I couldn't sell, I donated to a guy who worked with a prison literacy program. Recently, I donated about 200 books between my husband and me to a literacy program. Amazon can be a pain, but as long as I had the envelopes I needed and a way to print out the packing slip, I just went to the post office every couple of days. I was selling between 5-15 a day for about three weeks at the beginning. Of course, this was before 2008. Now, I'm lucky to sell one or two a month, but I have very few to sell nowadays. If you have old textbooks, you could hang flyers at local community colleges or universities.

[stand@desk]

I'm not much of a fan of selling my used items. My wife and I have sold a few things but it requires work, sometimes patience, buyers, holding the unwanted items in the meantime. Is the end goal to make money from the sale of the books or to get rid of the books? It really depends if you want to spend your time doing this or not. I suppose you could drop them off at the thrift store and then they get to sell them for $1-10 each. They can do that because they have the logistics to make it happen (store, customers) and they keep the profits but hey it helps the economy! I'm a bit skeptical of books donated to a charity, where they probably sell and entire large box of books to a thrift store for $5 and many probably just get thrown in the garbage at some point in the process.

I got rid of most of my books several years ago. I t just felt like they owned me and I didn't feel like carrying the baggage my whole life. Yea they were great books but when I discovered minimalism I decided to live light. Good Luck!

[The Old Man]

I donated my books to the library. It is also possible to get a tax write-off on the donation.

[jacob]

For amazon, look at the sales rank # ... If you're looking at a time scale of 1 year, I would not bother trying with anything over #250,000. Also, the seller account now has a match-price widget so you can battle the algos without manually entering the lowest price. (I suspect the sale almost always goes to the lowest price unless the quality of the book or the seller is really bad.)

[Scott 2]

Amazon will buy some used books from you. I've settled on taking whatever they offer, donating the rest. Books are so cheap, it's just not worth the time to sell individually.

[Ego]

7Wanna posted some very useful book selling tips in the Something From Nothing thread.

[OTCW]

You won't get much, but a used book store if you have one in the area that buys/trades.

The ones here give cash or trade credit. Credit amount is usually twice the cash amount. Have them break up the credit slips/vouchers or whatever in $50to $100 bites and sell them on Craigslist for maybe 80% of face value.

[daylen]

I will take a mathematical finance textbook off your hands if you have one. I'll pay shipping.

[m741]

Thanks everyone for the advice.

I decided to do this:
- Look on Amazon. Turns out resale, if you don't do "fulfillment by amazon" can make you a little money. Newer books or rarer books seem to be worth it. The calculation for profit for casual sellers is roughly X + 4 - 3.50 - 3, where 4 is shipping credit, 3.50 is amazon fees, and 3 is shipping cost. These are estimates, but the rough break-even point is 2.50. That's going the easy route with Amazon prepaid shipping and so on, and without the seller's account. But a lot of stuff will go for $6-$10, so there's a little money there. About 20% of my books qualify. I've sold 9 books so far, within a week. There's a post office right near where I work, so it's convenient.
- For stuff that's listed for < $2.50 on Amazon, go to the local bookstore (Strand is easiest in NYC). They give $1 per book and will buy ~60% of the books. I feel a little ripped off, but less so than before I started double-checking on Amazon.
- Donate the rest and get a tax receipt, or give them to friends.

I've gone through a few shelves so far and I'm feeling pretty good, slowly starting to approach manageable numbers.

As for other stuff, the company that I work at has a mini-craigslist internally, and I've sold some electronics and so on there. Craiglist itself also works, but is less convenient.

[EdithKeeler]

I sold a boatload of books on half.com, but it's been years ago. Don't know about the pricing structure, etc. now. It's owned by ebay.