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.

Proportionately

I was thinking yesterday that it might be worthwhile doing a little Google Adsense ad relating to this site – if I were to include books that could be bought on it, rather than just talking about ones that have already been sold.
But if it took off, I’d probably be struggling to keep up with it as well as my day job. For the time being I might stick with what I’m already doing – which is enough, even though the returns at present aren’t great.
And books, as I’ve found, aren’t necessarily the big seller on these online auction sites. They do sell, but it’s slow, and the returns aren’t always huge. Part of the problem is that each item you list is a one-off. Unlike my daughter’s friend, who sells clothing on Trade Me. She can sell the same sort of thing over and over and she does very well, by her own admission – even employs someone to do the wrapping and email answering. Though it’s still work – there ain’t no easy way of dealing with selling.
When I say the returns aren’t huge, I’m talking proportionately. Many of the books I sell have cost me under a dollar to buy, so virtually anything I get on them is profit, and (proportionately) a big markup. A book that costs me only a dollar and sells for four or five is doing very well in terms of return; it’s just that the actual dollar amount of the return isn’t high.
Now if I was buying books at $100 each and selling them for four or five hundred, things would be rather different!

Setting up Shelves

I've shifted in four sets of bookshelves tonight, so haven't much time to do anything else except wrap up some books sold on Trade Me, get some of the stuff off the floor where it's been lying waiting until the shelves came, and then writing on this blog.
One of the time-consuming parts of selling online is the wrapping up and making sure the addresses are correct and so forth. I used to run a bookstore which was run in conjunction with a secondhand shop. Someone else owned the secondhand part, and I remember him telling me early on that with Trade Me it was the writing up and photographing the books and the wrapping up that took up so much time. I guess in terms of running a bookshop it wasn't all that time-consuming, but when you're doing it on top of running a bookshop it does take its time, or when you're working at another job entirely and then have to do it all in the evenings, along with umpteen other things...
Anyway, another book gone today, One of Ben's, by NZ writer, Maurice Shadbolt. Not sure how long I've had this in my stock, but it feels like a while. The accounting system I use, MYOB, doesn't seem to indicate when a book first came into the 'shop.' Maybe I'll have to see if there's some way of keeping track of that.