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.

Things Look Up!

Suddenly it's boom time, on Trade Me - at least as far as I'm concerned. Nine books sold since the beginning of the month. Someone picked up two of the Alistair McLean titles I had; two other people have bought sporting books when I was beginning to wonder if anyone ever did anymore (and one of those books I've had almost since I started back in late 2006); an audio book on CD went (Minette Walters' Devil's Feather); a thriller went, a sci-fi collection, and a hymn book. How's that for a mixed bag?

I'd picked up the hymn book at the recent Regent Theatre non-book sale - it cost me rather more than I really wanted to pay for it - and it was only after I'd begun to advertise it that I discovered that it had a church's name stamped on it. Dear me. Let's hope it wasn't 'borrowed' long term!

Ins and Outs

Last Saturday we took the morning off and went to some garage sales and the St Hilda's School fair. There were some reasonable bits at the garage sales, but the fair was selling off books that were really worth picking up - although at first they were selling them rather too expensively. This must have become evident to them pretty quickly, as the prices went down just while we were there perusing.

Anyway, I got a fair bunch of books, and two of them were onsold before the weekend was out. That's the way I like it!

One of these was a children's book in really good condition (in fact very good condition was the general state of what I picked up), and the other a book on Anatomy for Artists, which went to someone who'd bought off me before - something that doesn't often happen to me on Trade Me.