Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Three


We’ve all seen this in the movies, a guy in a row-boat in the middle of a lake stands up only to have the dinghy wobble frantically about, threatening to tip him overboard until he finally finds his balance, standing very still in the centre of the boat in a sort of spider-man pose while he figures out what to do next…

That’s me, metaphorically speaking...

Last week my “boat” was wobbling. If you saw my blog you might have read between the lines; that I was doing the wobbly boat dance, wondering who let me take their boat out in the first place!

This week I’m doing the spider-man balancing pose, gradually finding my sea-legs while I ponder what to do next…

From the day I started Pimp My Twenty Bucks until Now I have not had a week like this one, in which I have sold so many titles, breaking all my previous personal records!

But enough chit-chat, let’s get straight into it!

This week I sold:


James Clavell’s Whirlwind -$3
James Clavell’s Noble House -$3
James Clavell’s Tai-pan -$3
The Fellowship of the Ring -$3
The Clan of the Cave Bear -$3
The Bridges of Madison County -$3
If only they could talk, J Herriot -$3
Overload, Arthur Hailey -$3
Snouts in the Trough, A Fraser -$3
King James Bible -$25

Leaving me with a nice total of $52!

Understandably I’m shocked, especially after months of pulling in dribs and drabs, $5 here and $9 there, like a kid catching sprats with oat meal until suddenly out jumps a $52 stingray!

That particular Bible that I sold cost me less than 20 cents! It was actually one of the titles I picked up in the “Bag of books for $2” deal at the School Gala from a couple of weeks ago. The Good Book scored nine bids with about 11 Trademe users “watching” it. I felt so bad about selling a second hand Bible for that much money that I actually waived the postage fee! I always knew the Bible was the World’s Number One Best Seller of all time, but this week I experienced it firsthand!

I’ll be looking out for old Bibles when I do my op-shopping from now on!

Actually that wasn’t the only surprise this week. From the beginning I have played it safer than safe, only buying books by authors I recognized and titles I knew. But having bought those bags of books I ended up with a lot of “randoms” like, “If only they could talk” by James Herriot and “Overload” by Arthur Hailey, books and authors that made me say things like, “Arthur Who?” This has really challenged my thinking on sticking solely to what I know, maybe I need to intentionally buy the odd “unknown” and try my luck?

Another stimulating eventuality is that now that my friends and family have caught on to what I’m doing I seem to be getting the odd freebie thrown my way, and again they tend to be books from the realm of obscure authors. But after selling “Snouts in the Trough” by Andrew Fraser for $3, that’s a 100% profit on that one, I don’t think I’ll be saying no to people wanting to offload their “junk” books on me in the future! (There’s a hint buried in this paragraph for anyone who missed it).

Anyway, back to the numbers…

This week I’m saying, “To heck with it!” I’m going to resume my usual practice of replacing every book I sell with two more. I’ve purchased 20 books for $12, and one of them happens to be a Bible! Here’s hoping for a similar success this week!

This week I’ve relisted all the listings that ended today as well as some of the ones that closed during the week, bringing my current total of books listed to 102 titles! (That’s without the 20 new titles; it’ll take me all week to list these…)

After subtracting success fees, listing fees and the purchasing of new merchandise I now have $74 and only $426 to go until I’ve reached my goal for this series of $500.

But alas, a week of success such as this one has not come without its pitfalls. My laptop passed away this week due to a freak technological illness known in the IT world as - Itscompletelystuffed. I like to think that a cyborg was sent back from the distant future to prevent me from becoming an internet billionaire by destroying my computer, but my psychologist tells me that this isn’t true, even though I know my psychologist is the cyborg who did it...

But back to “reality”, although I do 90% of my internetage on the old iPhone and iPad, this does mean that I won’t be able to put the usual links at the end of my Blogs, except for what I can cut and paste from old blogs that is, until I can figure out how to get a new laptop! This also means I won’t be publishing my eBook “Pimp My Twenty Bucks” in the near future. Blasted futuristic cyborgs!

So now I leave you to wallow in expectant eagerness for my next installment… until then, here’s some dots…

Click Here to read Part Four of this series

Click Here if you would like to follow my progress on Facebook!

Click Here to read this series from the beginning!

Click Here to read my awesome last series, Pimp My Twenty Bucks

Click Here to view my Trademe Listings

Comments

  1. Just a heads up dude. Make sure you check all your books and make sure they arent First editions. Cause if they are )and are popular books) they can be worth a lot of money. A workmate of mine owns a first edition of Little Women and it has been valued at $28,000

    And you might be surprised what you find at school fetes and bookshops (some people have no idea - things just handed down from gramps and so on)

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  2. Great thinking Dan, I think I may have already been stung by not thinking about this, I sold a rare book last week for only $6 without knowing what it was... The buyer was wrapped obviously! Thanks for following! I have another school fate to scope out this weekend:)

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