Cookbooks

While I'm talking about food, my recent cookbook scheme comes to mind.

So I joined up with a GPT (Get Paid To) site InboxDollars (yeah I just stuck a refferer link in there, eh can't be blamed for trying). Some of the various offers they had is to sign up with various bookclub sites. Their basic premise is that you sign up and get a bunch of $1 books and you commit to buy some additional ones at their regular prices over the next year (oh yeah and unless you actively turn down their offer they'll send out one per month). Generally I don't consider it that great a deal because their regular prices aren't all that impressive and the shipping costs make them even less so when compared to other popular sites like amazon and half.com/ebay.

But one of these sites (thegoodcook.com) specifically geared towards selling cookbooks in this fashion caught my attention. The promotion was/is that you get 4 books for a dollar and are only committed to buying two more (with the option to immediately buy one of those at 1/2 price). Now cookbooks are usually more pricy than you're run of the mill paperback, so this seemed like a pretty good offer. Looking at the average ebay rates, I found that the celebrity chef books sell pretty well, near $20 for names like Alton Brown and Julia Child. So having done my preliminary work I dove into the my newly hatching scheme.

I ordered a mix of books that looked easy to turn around on ebay, and for ~$30 I got two The art of French Cooking, Good Eats the Early years, and Barefoot Contessa (and picked up another that I intend to actually keep). It took about a week from ordering for the package to arrive and it did come with the notice that they were going to ship me this month's featured book unless I responded. Though they do accept online notification, so a quick trip to the website spared me the cost of a stamp to opt out of the book shipment.

I've since sold them on eBay by pricing them about 10% under the average selling price. Each book was gone within a two days of posting with both French Cooking books being snapped up within the first day (and fetching the highest price). I made ~$15 per book (post eBay, paypal fees and shipping costs). So now I just need to buy one more book over the year, and if I choose right, should be able to end up mostly with a wash if I ebay it, or maybe I can pick up one of their selection of non-cook books as well.

So all told I'm currently sitting up about $30 and a cook book from this venture (well and with a commitment to buy 1 more). Not to mention the extra $10 that I got for signing up for this through the GPT site. Now I'm certain that I could have optimized a bit better, but I was hedging by diversifying my offerings, and looking for quick turnaround especially to catch some of the holiday shopping. But still, not that bad of a haul for this adventure.