Make Money Tearing Up Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them
on eBay
by Avril Harper
Published on this site: June 22nd, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
For the past few years I've been tearing up old books and magazines,
and selling them on eBay. Other people's "rubbish" is
earning me $20 a time - sometimes a great deal more - every single
day!
It's an easy business and items other people throw away can attract
fierce bidding and incredible profits for me and other lucky sellers.
We're selling prints and advertisements, crochet and woodworking
patterns, recipe books and other niche market publications, alongside
hundreds more totally different items, all taken from books, magazines
and newspapers that are available in profusion and cost very little.
Let's start with old prints, they're incredibly good sellers, especially
popular themes like: animals, sports (especially golf and horse
racing), royalty, music hall artists, topographical (named locations)
and children.
Very early magazines contained lots of prints, the best being Illustrated
London News, The Graphic, Sketch, Sphere, and all you do is remove
prints carefully, trim the rough edges, package to protect and make
them more attractive, then list them on eBay. These tips will help
you get started in this hugely profitable business:
- Frame your prints for extra add-on value. Look for old (antique
and modern) picture frames at boot and garage sales, flea markets
and collectors' fairs, and make a point of visiting auctions where
boxes of frames can be bought at a pittance.
- Have black and white prints and engravings hand colored and
mounted or framed to increase the value of even the most common
and cheapest print.
- Give a Certificate of Authenticity. This is simply a sheet
of paper, with or without decorative border, which testifies that
the print is original and taken from a specific source published
on a particular date. The certificate is always taped lightly
to the back of the print in the mount so that it cannot be removed
and added to another print obtained elsewhere.
- Make your listing for the print descriptive and include details
that are likely to attract bidders and be sure to include words
they might use to find products like yours.
- Make sure your listings include age, theme, date and source
of your prints.
- If your original book is special, say a first edition, or a
limited edition, say so in your listing. To people viewing your
listings it might make the difference between a sale and giving
your product the miss.
- Take great care removing prints from publications. We tend
to open the book midway and fold it back on itself, making it
very easy to break or weaken the spine and therefore loosen the
pages.
- A great place to get quality mounts very inexpensively is on
eBay itself. Go to the search facility, request a search
for items locally (so many available it isn't worth looking
long distance), and use keywords like: "mounts",
"photo mounts", and wait for a nice selection
of suppliers to appear, some selling items by auction, others
offering "Buy It Now".
- When you find a good supplier stick to that person and even
buy their items outside of eBay without breaking eBay's rules
of course.
There's more to it than just prints, you have the pick of dozens
of different products to sell, all from old books and magazines,
and just a few minutes easy work. Did I say "work", this
isn't work, this is exciting stuff!
Avril Harper is the author of Make Money Tearing Up
Old Books and Magazines and Selling Them on eBay (http://www.benbeau.com).
Contact at: mailto:[email protected]
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