An Ace in the Hole, Part II

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Among the places I look for and discover books are yard sales, library book sales, estate sales, auctions, and flea markets. An added advantage of hanging out a shingle is that many books will walk in the door. In other words, people will come to you with books to sell, providing you a cheap and time-efficient way of adding to your stock. If this kind of shopping doesn't interest you, then stop right here because this probably isn't the business for you. Getting to the right sale first and leaving with an armful of treasures is to me the greatest joy of the used-book trade.

Although you will find others out there competing with you for the books that you want, there will be days when everything breaks just right. Once a couple of summers ago, I turned up at a local private school where a day-long fund-raiser was just beginning. In addition to an auction and other events, there was a small table of books in the back. The books were all sorted out into categories and ready to sell but the gentleman in charge said the sale wasn't to start for another half hour. I was happy enough to be the first one there and asked if it would be all right to look around. He not only told me to go ahead and look around but that I may as well grab an empty box and set aside anything that I was interested in. By the time anyone else had shown up I had three boxes of cookbooks, a set of Ulysses Grant memoirs and enough highly salable novels and reference books to make my day.

I spent about $60 at that sale, but before I left the parking lot, I had sold $150 worth of books to late-arriving dealers. And those sales hardly made a dent in the stock I had acquired! Of course, you will not always be the first one at every sale and even when you are you may not find the pickings as juicy. But believe me, if you are persistent you will have enough of those experiences to keep you coming back for more.

Once you have put together an inventory of books you will, of course, have to find a location from which to offer your wares to the public. If you are going the route of a general shop, including several subject areas, then you should probably have a minimum of about 2,000 books.

The first place to consider officially becoming a bookseller may be right in your own home. If you are lucky enough to be located in an area of your community where the zoning allows a retail enterprise, this is your best option in terms of cost.

For a beginning stock, one or two rooms in your house should suffice. You will save on the overhead of paying rent and at tax time can deduct a certain amount from your household expenses toward a home business.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print