Alibris comes alive again

Yesterday I arrived home to find an email from Alibris telling me that they were charging my credit card US$19.95. I was a bit puzzled about this, as there didn't seem to be any obvious reason why they should be charging me, but an enquiry to them got an answer that this was (of course!) the annual fee.
I haven't had a thing from Alibris over the last year, so in a way it's a bit of a fizzer to be charged that annual fee again.
However, within 24 hours there was another email telling me that a book that's been on there since I first joined up with Alibris has sold. Weird. Things being what they are in the exchange rate at the moment, it's probably a good time to sell to the US. The postage rate they automatically pay us Kiwis is US$10, which at the moment translates to about $18.90. The book price is quite tidy too, though not quite on a par with my last Alibris sale. (My one and only other Alibris sale!)
The book that's just gone was The Book of Books, by Annalee Skarin, one of those strange versions of Christian thinking that seem to intrigue some people. I got it with a bunch of other similar titles from a secondhand dealer, to sell on behalf. It's the first to go in a long time!

Nothing happening

Nothing happening on here at the moment, because I've stopped selling books for the time being. Just got too busy doing other things, and decided to give it a rest. To be quite honest I make more money more regularly out of doing paid posts on the Net than I do out of Trade Me, even though the latter has its moments. I'll get back to it maybe in the summer when the days are longer (!)

Nearly a month

It's nearly a month since I posted on here. In part that's because I've been fairly busy with a different aspect of my life, namely rehearsing for a play. Originally I only had a small part, but then circumstances turned out that I've been asked to take over as assistant director, a role which has actually meant that I've done virtually all the directing for the last couple of weeks. And since this quite time consuming at the moment, other things have had to take second place.
To be honest, while I was certainly making money with the bookselling, it wasn't much money, and some books certainly weren't pulling their weight in terms of getting themselves off the shelf quickly.
So for the moment, I'm giving the bookselling a rest. I'll be back, no doubt.

Well, if I thought I was doing well selling nearly 40 books when I wrote a couple of posts ago, I've now sold 49 for the month. Pretty good going.
My latest was Hitmen, a book about the music industry, which I only put on Trade Me last night. It was gone this morning. I'd had it on Alibris for some time as well, but never got a whiff of a sniff on there. That site's a bit of a dead loss for non-American sellers, I think, since by default the site puts the postage up very high for overseas customers.

Books on the roundabout

I've probably mentioned here before that I sometimes acquire very good books at the local Rubbish Dump's shop (sorry, it's called the Transfer Station these days!).

Two or three weeks ago I found a box with several books in it and amongst them were the two volumes of Hans-Joachim Kraus' Psalmen (or Psalms, to you non-German speakers). They were in very good condition.

These books came out as part of the Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament series in the early 70s. The two volumes are in German, otherwise I'd very likely hang onto them myself, but my German isn't up to reading thick tomes with technical language, so I decided to put them on Trade Me, in the unlikely event that someone would buy them. So far no one has, but while I was talking to a friend from church the other day I mentioned these, and he was interested in them - he apparently reads German a good deal better than I do.

So they've found a new home. A slightly different kind of home to the one I expected, but a home, nevertheless.

The state of play

I've been a bit pushed for time over the last couple of weeks, so notes on this blog have suffered as a result.
It's been a busy patch: I've sold nearly 40 books since the beginning of April, which must a fair record in my terms. Things are still trickling along, but not with the speed they were.
Several things may not be helping: petrol's well and truly up in price; NZ Post altered their prices considerably at the beginning of the month, which affected all the Trade Me sales; a lot of people are edgy over the economy, I suspect, with talk of recession and mortgagee sales (70% more in Auckland this year than last year, when they were comparatively rare. )
On the plus side, I finally took the plunge and signed up for Trade Me' s credit card set-up, where you get paid straight away. I thought the cost of it would outweigh the benefits, but in fact, I've found more people paying by c/card than I expected. So that's been a bonus.

A record week!

I suspect that this is my best week ever on Trade Me, although I'm not going to say that for definite, as I had some pretty good weeks when I first starting selling on it, a year and a half ago.

Anyway, as of now, the book count is up to 13 and there's a pile of wrapped up books sitting on my floor waiting for the payments to show up in my account. And it hasn't just been the really good stuff that's gone. As I said yesterday books I've had for some time have suddenly decided to move, and today I sold another one I've had for a good while.

I'm not giving up my day job just yet, but at least there's a decent bit of income turning up. Now, of course, with the 31st March just gone, I'm going to have to sit down and work out what I've earned and what's been spent for this financial year. MYOB will help, but it will still need a bit of sorting.