So, what does this mean to you? Well, if probability theory is correct, it means that you probably buy a book or two every year, potentially every month, and possibly each few days. What it means for certain is that a whole bunch of books are bought and sold every day, and if you have the ambition to make some money and run a home-based bookstore, you could be making money selling some of them yourself!



This is an ideal opportunity for the stay at home mom, the college student looking to make a respectable income doing something besides tossing pizza, the retired couple on a fixed income wanting to supplement it, or anyone looking to start a home-based-business on a small part-time basis and grow it to a full-time business. It requires very little investment (approximately $300), if it is done right, and there is no reason for doing it any other way because you can easily find out the online value of a book BEFORE you even buy it for your inventory, the risk is almost non-existent, and the profit margins are much better than almost anything else you could do with such low risk and minimal investment. I have realized an overall profit margin of over 350% over the past five years! Nothing I could do in the stock market or anywhere else would allow me to invest just $300, recover it within a month, and make a steady income of $2k to $5k per month working only part-time. I have a full-time job flight testing airplanes, so I do not have more than 15-20 hours per week to put into the online bookselling business. Everything in your online bookselling business could easily be paid for within ONE MONTH and never require that you invest another dime of your money.

This isn't hype, and it certainly isn't a scam. I know you have heard of Amazon.com, so you know books are sold online every day. Did you know that 29% of the sales through Amazon.com are third-party sellers and that Amazon.com has nothing to do with these sales except for listing and exchanging the funds? That's right, 29% and growing steadily. Did you know that Amazon.com had over $6B in sales in the last quarter alone? If 29% of those sales were third-part sales, then there were almost $2B in third-party sales through Amazon! You should also know that Amazon is not the only online marketplace for books, there are dozens of others as well, and you can sell books through most of them from the comfort of your own home.

About five years ago, I started my home-based online bookselling business with the encouragement of my youngest son. He had already been doing it for a couple years and was making more doing it part-time than I was making working full-time as a senior design engineer in the aerospace industry. I still only operate my online bookselling business as a part-time supplemental income because I enjoy flight-testing airplanes, but I am well enough established and knowledgeable enough about the business that if things turned sour in aerospace I could scale up my bookselling business and make a good living from home. My reason for continuing in the online bookselling business is that my wife is Czech, she travels to the Czech Republic a few times each year and I go there usually twice a year, and our online bookselling business pays for all this travel.

After selling books online for a few years, I decided to write a book about how to do it. I used detailed notes from my own experiences as well as notes I took while coaching others to become successful online booksellers, and put together what I believe to be the most comprehensive book on the subject. My thought was that I would market it to people looking to start their own home-based business. There have been several people that have done just that, however, I was surprised by the large number of experienced online booksellers that have bought my book and complimented me for not only the content of my book, but the practical way I arranged it.

Recently, I attended the 2006 Independent Amazon Booksellers' Convention in Seattle and displayed my book and my "Bookkeeping for Booksellers" software with the hopes of establishing a few affiliations. Well, I was not only able to establish these associations with some of the finest and most well known third-party online bookseller services, I ran out of copies of my book because other booksellers wanted to buy them. I did not anticipate this, but it was nice to see experienced sellers thumb through the book and buy it on the spot.

One such bookseller told me that if my book had just one tip in it that he was not aware of before, it was well worth the price. The next day at the convention, he told me he found many great tips in my book that he had not heard of before. I still think the most exciting part was getting to meet some of my earlier customers that were just getting their businesses started and to hear how much they appreciated me taking the time to write the book.

Anyway, if you are going to wait for someone to knock on your door and hand you the key to a successful business that is going to make you millions, require no investment on your part, requires that you learn nothing, and not take any of your time to do it, I want to wish you the best of luck. My bet is you are going to be waiting a long time. If you are looking for a way to make a nice income from your home doing something legitimate that does not require you to sell to your family, friends, or neighbors, you really should spend some time looking into online bookselling.

Copyright 2006 Michael Mould