Just Four Quid

Although Ebay wouldn’t be my first choice for selling books, it’s probably the next best thing after Amazon, if only because of the sheer size of its customer base. Amazon and Ebay often seem to operate as different worlds, with prices on one bearing no relation to the other, so a book going for peanuts on Amazon might do a bit better on Ebay. I’ll be talking more about Ebay later in the year but if you’re already familiar with it, you might want to give it a go for your books.

The main downside of Ebay is that it’s an auction with a listing fee to pay (unless you’re willing to risk selling your book for 99p or less) in addition to fees that kick in once you sell. So if you don’t sell, you make a loss. The longest that you (as a private seller) can list your book for is 10 days, after which you would have to pay to relist it, whereas you can relist forever on Amazon without paying a penny. It takes longer to list a book on Ebay; it’s best to provide a photo of anything you sell, which adds to the work. Also, I’m not convinced that Ebay is the website of choice for people looking for books, unless they already know it well.

However, there are advantages of Ebay over Amazon. On Ebay, you set the closing date for your auction so that you know when you might have to go to the post office. You can set your own p&p charges (very useful for heavy books); you also have the option of selling books as lots. For example, last year I wanted to sell the first five in Alexander McCall Smith’s “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series but they were so cheap on Amazon that it wasn’t worth it. I offered them as a bundle on Ebay and sold them successfully.

Also, unlike Amazon, Ebay allow you to tick a box (using the “Advanced selling” option) to donate whatever proportion you choose of your final sale price to a charity and use gift aid. If your book sells, you get that proportion of your listing and final value fees credited back to you (but only if it sells!) and the donation is taken care of automatically. MERUK is set up on Ebay, as is the ME Association, but not the Ramsay Research Fund specifically (which the MEA is working on).

My usual strategy is to list things on Amazon and then go through the remainder for their suitability for Ebay, bearing in mind that if they don’t sell, I’ll have made a loss. I don’t have anything this time, but it’s always worth thinking about.

Meanwhile, I sold three of the books yesterday that I listed on Amazon the day before! Ironically, one of them was a copy of “Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell. She decided to set herself a challenge of learning to cook all of the 524 recipes in a classic book of French cookery in the space of a year. She blogged about it, and wrote up the experience in this book. How appropriate that my first book to sell is about a woman doing a blog for a year’s project! Altogether I made £9.03 profit so I’ll be donating half to the charities (see my MERUK page and my RRF page).

Money I’ve raised today: £4.52

Money I’ve raised so far: £141.67