Saturday, January 15, 2011

soon to appear on eBay

A few things that'll soon be appearing on eBay:

1. An ad for Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms, to be sold at a reduced price so I can finally get rid of the few dozen copies I have left. I'm planning a major overhaul of this book as one of my long-term projects; what I'd eventually like to do is put a revised edition of the work on CafePress.

2. An ad for a Philosophy of Religion course-- $345 per person, like the Korean course I blogged about earlier. That's not a random number; I'm trying to undersell the per-credit-hour cost at Northern Virginia Community College, all while compensating for PayPal's subtraction of a percentage and eBay's cruel subtraction of a "final value" fee (ten percent!!).

3. Several ads for suits I no longer wear. I doubt I'll price these above $25 for an ensemble, and $15 for either a jacket or a pair of pants.

4. An ad for a set of hand-painted German drinking glasses. They're nothing special, but they're salable. Most likely I'll price these at $2 per glass, and sell them as a set.

5. An ad for French lessons (done in the style of #2 above).

6. An ad for a Religious Diversity course (also in the style of #2 above).

I'm debating whether to sell some of my old books on eBay. It goes against my nature to sell books I've owned, but I do possess a few that I'm now somewhat ashamed to own-- mostly movie novelizations from my childhood that I wouldn't mind doing away with at a few cents per book. I may even donate these books to the local used bookseller; we've got one down the street.


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5 comments:

Charles said...

Are these going to be auctioned or are the prices you quote above the final prices? Just curious--the German drinking glasses sound interesting.

Kevin Kim said...

The lessons will be offered on eBay at a fixed "Buy It Now" price; the drinking glasses will have both a "Buy It Now" price and a somewhat lower bidding price. The glasses belonged to my great aunt and uncle; they're not all that impressive looking, but they do have some interesting quirks, such as not all being exactly the same height despite belonging to the same set.

SJHoneywell said...

You may have better luck with the books by selling on Amazon. Worth looking into, at least, since Amazon is sort of the de facto Internet destination for people looking to purchase books.

Kevin Kim said...

Steve,

How does that work? Years ago, I used a service called "Amazon Advantage," which turned out not to be much of an advantage: they ate 55% of the book's cover price and made you do your own shipping. They also wouldn't allow you to ship in bulk, which meant that shipping costs were always high. I ended up losing money with that program, so I quit it (they also charged a periodic fee if you wanted to stay in the program).

Are you talking about Amazon Marketplace, or something along those lines? I have no idea how that works. Maybe I'll search the site to see what instructions there are. (My old Scary Spasms entry is still visible on Amazon, along with customer reviews, by the way.)

SJHoneywell said...

It's been a few years since I've used Amazon to sell books--they stuff I wrote in the past had a pretty limited shelf life and no one wants them much any more.

As I recall, I did have to pay shipping, but had a specific amount added to my selling costs to cover.

Worth looking at, if for no other reason than to see what's there.