Hey, what’s happening everybody on YouTube? Steve here with Raiken Profit coming back to you with another video from live in my kitchen. And I’m actually getting ready to make some potatoes. I’m pretty excited about that. But in any event, in today’s video I want to answer a question that I got in one of my latest videos. As you can see, here’s a video of myself talking about some beginner tips on buying and selling books on Amazon. And I got a question, saying … It’s actually from [Tanya Gonzalez] asking, “Where do you get all these books? I know thrift stores. I went to three different Goodwills, and didn’t find anything that was worth reselling on a bookshelf. Should I just go more often? Any tips on finding books? Thank you.” So, Tanya Gonzalez, want to thank you for this question. Appreciate you checking out my channel and everything.

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So let me get right into this question. So, let’s talk about, where do I get my books. I live in Connecticut, first of all, to give you some context to this conversation. But primarily I go sourcing for books at my local thrift stores. So I’m lucky enough, in Connecticut, to have a bunch of Savers thrift stores in the area. And if you don’t know what Savers is, it’s kind of like a Value Village on steroids. What’s the other one called? I forget what it’s called, but there’s another one that’s somewhat like Value Village as well. But Savers is big.

It’s a huge thrift store, and they got tons of items. Electronics, toys, clothing. But their book section is massive over there, and the thing I like about Savers, at least in the Savers in my area, I’ve seen different ones, but the Savers in Connecticut, they usually price their books at $1.99 or $2.99, even for the big textbooks. Now, granted, there are some Savers where they’ll put, like, $10, $12, $15 prices on their textbooks. But the ones around here at Savers, I could get a textbook for three bucks. Two to three bucks. I do really good at Savers. There’s a tons of books, a lot of them fall through the cracks. Nonfiction, fiction. My mother, Momma Profits, if you’ve seen her on some of my videos, she actually does a lot of kids’ books, and children’s books as well.

So, I get a lot of my books from Savers, I get a lot of my books from Goodwills. Salvation Army, I used to do really well with books over there. But they’ve been kind of going, like, down the drain. They changed up their pricing structure. Before, you used to be able to get like three books for a dollar. But now they’re doing this new thing that, the price of the book will be 90 percent off the MSRP. So if the book’s coming in at 30 bucks, then it’ll be $3. Which isn’t bad, but a lot of the textbooks might have prices on at like 70, 80, 90, hundred bucks. And they are … it just gets crazy. Still, don’t discriminate against Salvation Army. It’s really different based on the location and whatnot.

So, yeah, thrift stories is primarily where I get my books. Now, you did ask a question, Tanya, asking, “Should I just go more often?” And to answer that, I’d say yes. You definitely have to go more often if you want to find more books, obviously. But even more importantly, you gotta find the best days and the best times. For me, I’ve always found that I do best in the morning to afternoon time. Typically like Monday through Wednesday. It seems like when Thursday hits, Friday, Saturday, like, people are getting out of work early. There’s more competition over there. And I just don’t find as much. But again, that’s just me, my location and how I’ve been doing. But you’re going to have to figure out, Tanya, when’s the best time for you to go. Right? When do the Goodwills or the Savers, when do they bring out the new inventory. When is the competition most likely not going to be there.

And one thing I want to say is, there is a lot of competition now with booksellers and book scanners don’t let people fool you and say there’s no booksellers out there. They’re out there. And they’re coming more and more, I’ve noticed it. There’s so many more scanners out there. But still, even with all the competition that’s emerging, and I think there’s going to be a lot more coming over the next couple years, for the lower barrier entry types of sourcing, like book selling. I mean, it’s pretty much the easiest thing out there. I think there’s going to be a lot more coming. But there’s still so much inventory. There’s so many donations in the USA that there’s enough to go around. You just need to be smart about when you go, how often you go, and the times you go. And the locations. Finding the honey holes. That’s another tip. Find the honey holes. Find the ones that do best for you. Tanya, maybe there’s a thrift store you always go to, and you always find amazing scores. Go there more. You know, make relationships with the workers. Find out when the carts are coming out.

So, hopefully that answered your question. I’m looking down right now to make sure I touched on your question thoroughly. Oh yeah, one more thing I wanted to mention is, different places that you can go other than thrift stories. So, again, I typically go to thrift stores. But some really awesome places you could go are to yard sales. Once in a while, you’ll find massive amounts of books at yard sales for like 10 cents, 15, 20 cents. I mean, sometimes they’ll just say take it all. Take everything for five bucks, and you could get really good deals at garage sales.

Probably one of the best places to go are to the book sales when like a church is running a book sale, or maybe a library is clearing all their stuff out. I don’t remember what the … What is the website called? I think its like bookfinder.com or Book Sale Finder. I’m going to figure out what that website is, Tanya, and I’ll leave a link in the description below. And that’s a website that will allow you to put in your location, and you’ll be able to find all the book sales in your area. So that’s really, really helpful. I do have a few friends who do well at flea markets, finding books. I’m not a big flea market guy. I haven’t gone to a tone of them, so I can’t really give you my opinion, because I don’t really have much experience. But I know others have done well at flea markets.

One more thing as well, quick story. I was in San Jose, California. And my buddy, Yong, who is actually one of my business partners in the Green Room that we run, we went to his antique mall, and he was there doing his thing. I think he was, like, pricing some items, paying rent for his antique booth and everything like that. And I was getting bored. And I’m like, you know what? I’m going to look around this places, and I’m going to try to find a way to make some money. I said to myself, I’m going to make something. I’m going to buy something that I could flip, here. And I didn’t know what I was going to find. I’m really bad with antiques. At the time, I wasn’t selling on eBay, so I was trying to find something I could flip on Amazon.

And I was going from booth to booth, wasn’t really finding much. And then I came across a booth that actually ended up being the owner of the antique mall. He had, actually, a big booth, and he had tons of books. And I said, you know what? I’m going to just start scanning some books, and se if I could find a deal. I started scanning some books, five, six, seven, eight books. And finally I came across one that had, like, $20 profit in it. And I’m , wow. Like, I can’t believe this is here. The prices were marked a little higher. I think it was like five bucks for the book. But it was going for like 30 bucks or something. And I’m like, wow, this is awesome. And I kept scanning and scanning and scanning. And about an hour and a half later, Yong comes over and he’s like, what are you doing, man? He was like, caught up in a conversation. I’m like, man I scored big time over here. And I had like a pile this high of books. I had, like, 50 books. And I’m like, whose booth is this, man? Like, I kill it. He’s like, dude, that’s the owner of the antique mall’s. I’m like, wow, man. I just scored big time.

So, really to make a long story short, you never know where you’re going to find books. You could find them at the antique mall, in a booth. You could find them at flea markets, at thrift stores, at book sales, yard sales. I mean, the list goes on and on. The key is to just go out to these places and just scan, scan, scan. The more you scan, the more money you’re going to make. So, hopefully you enjoyed this long-winded response, Tanya. I appreciate you leaving a comment on this video. And I appreciate every one of you guys watching this video. If you guys are looking to start making money on Amazon, probably one of the best ways is to sell books. I mean, it’s a cheap investment. It’s pretty much low-risk. It’s really easy to kind of, like, take a look at the condition and not sell something that’s broken, and it’s just easy to read the rank. And the profit margins are there. So, we’ll talk about that in another video.

But yeah, thanks for watching, guys. Hopefully you enjoyed. Like, comment, share if you could. Share it on your Facebook, Twitter. I’d appreciate that. Also, check me out on Instagram, @raikenprofit and Periscope @RaikenProfit, and Snapchat too, if you really want to have some fun. All right, guys. I’m out of here. I’m talking too much. I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.