Friday 15 February 2019

Fleamarket

Today is Fleamarket day in Tonbridge, Kent, and I have half a table to flog some of my surplus books. I think this must be the first time I've reported live. My wife has the other half of the table to sell clothes.

As we don't drive we had to drag everything here in shopping trolleys, but we've got enough stuff to fill the table and will hopefully have lighter loads on our way home.

Books would not be a good option if I was trading for profit. They're bulky and the bottom has fallen out of the second-hand book market. So many books can be bought for 1p plus postage on Amazon or in charity shops for 50p which is where some of these books were originally accumulated.

But my motivation for disposal is my storage crisis. It was books or figures, so I decided to dump books. I started with my least wanted ones, but some of them are just duplicates which I tend to accumulate accidentally despite having a database on my phone!

3 comments:

  1. I took £11.50 and my wife took £4. As the stall cost £15, we made an overall 'profit' of 50p for 10 man-hours. That's 5p an hour! Anyway, I won't be doing this again.

    It's still a slight shock to find that books you've paid hundreds if not thousands of pounds for turn out to be little more than transient consumables.

    The stock for today's experiment represents only a fraction of the books I need to shift. I have a few Ospreys I can sell at wargame shows for about £4 each. Otherwise I'll sell what I can to We Buy Books or Ziffit if I can get 20p or so per book, and just give the rest to a local charity shop.

    I've considered selling books through Amazon and eBay, but it would be labour-intensive and could take a long time. I'm not looking for a job. It's much easier to scan barcodes into a mobile phone app and get an instant quote.

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  2. I don't know if you would be willing to ship abroad and to take Paypal, but you might consider posting the list on your blog? You may well find your most interested audience here!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the suggestion. I would use eBay if I wanted to do that, but few of the books are valuable enough to justify it. If I get round to selling some armies, I will certainly consider putting them on eBay.

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