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!

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.

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.