The Green Frugal

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Last week I spoke with a customer who was raising money for her daughter’s high school grad night.  She came up with a brilliant idea to collect books from students, parents, and teachers.  She would sell the books collected to Cash4Books and deposit the proceeds into a PayPal account she had created for the school.

This got our brains at Cash4Books thinking: what an amazingly green and creative way to get rid of unwanted books and raise money for a great cause! She inspired us to share with you how Cash4Books can help fundraising groups raise money.

However, before you start emailing, texting, tweeting, and changing your facebook status – here are a few things to consider before collecting boxes of books!

Cash4Books may not buy all books.  What we buy can change day-to-day depending on resale values, our current inventory, and market demand.

What kind of books is Cash4Books more likely to buy?

To get started with your fundraising, there are five easy steps.

1. Set up your group’s PayPal* account.  The coordinator of the group shares the PayPal account (email) name with group members.  When each group member registers an account on Cash4Books, they choose PayPal as their payment preference and then they enter the group’s PayPal email at the bottom of the Cash4Books registration form. Each group member must register with their own Cash4Books account, but the PayPal email is what is common across all group members.
2. Second, each group member types in ISBNs, of their books to donate, into the box on the Cash4Books.net homepage.  They do this from their own home computer, at their own convenience. They will get a price quote for each book we are buying.
3. Third, each group member chooses their own FREE shipping method.  Cash4Books will provide everyone with prepaid shipping labels, so there is no cost to the group or group members! If any of your group members to not have a printer at home, we have a solution for that too–they simply contact us and request free shipping labels be mailed to them.
4. Fourth, group members pack and ship their books to us. The group coordinator may optionally help facilitate this process by providing boxes. Read our FAQ for suggestions on where to find boxes.
5. Five, Cash4Books receives and inspects the books, and then deposits payment into your group’s PayPal account within three business days.

For questions, special requests or considerations please contact us.

This method of having group members enter their ISBNs from their own home computer is generally preferable to the alternative method (not described here) of having a book drive and a single point drop-off location. This is because book drives tend to get older books that are in low demand, which decreases the chance that Cash4Books will buy them. For more information, read our blog article “Why didn’t Cash4Books want to buy my book?“.

* As an alternative to PayPal, Cash4Books can also issue a check to your group by sharing the name and address field across group members in the registration process.

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Goodnight Moon. The Bernstein Bears. Love You Forever. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Many of these titles evoke a sense of nostalgia and warm memories of our childhood. Today, however, countless children do not have access to books outside of the classroom.

Last weekend, several Cash4Books employees donated their time and book-cleaning skills to support the mission of The Children’s Book Bank – a local non-profit which strives to improve the literacy skills of low-income children by giving them books of their own before they reach kindergarten. Their goal? To help break the cycle of poor literacy which often plagues low-income families, generation after generation.

Over the course of several hours, Cash4Books employees worked to prepare books for preschoolers. Scribbles were erased, inscriptions were covered, spines were reinforced, torn pages were taped, and covers were wiped with organic cleaners. There was also a bit of reminiscing over our childhood favorites, too!

According to The Children’s Book Bank website:

• In homes in middle income neighborhoods, the ratio of books to children is 13 books for every child.
• In low income neighborhoods the ratio is 1 book for every 300 children.

The Children’s Book Bank also notes that “research shows that children with books at home who are read to at an early age become better readers and do better in school.”

For more information on the Children’s Book Bank or how to get involved, please visit their website at:

www.childrensbookbank.org

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That’s the most frequent question we hear from our customers looking to sell used books at Cash4Books.net.  It would be nice to have an easy answer, but the truth is there are almost as many answers as there are books.  Let me explain just a few of the universal truths of used book buying.

Universal #1:  Ye olde basic law of supply and demand.

Blame Adam Smith.  While Smith wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea, he was the first to popularize the “Law of supply and demand.”  In the used book world, this means we base much of our decision to purchase a book on how well it is currently selling and how many copies we have on hand.

At Cash4Books, we consider this decision as both an art and a science.  The science comes from data we accumulate from our own sales history and current online marketplaces.  Skilled and experienced bookselling professionals who review of our buying list provide the art.  Our current buying list includes over 280,000 unique ISBNs.  And, yes, it really does change daily.  Here’s our example list of some that we’ve bought recently.

Universal #2:  Condition, condition, condition.

Just like “location, location, location” are the three most important things in real estate, “condition, condition, condition” is what sells a used book.   Cash4Books loves books and knows that you do too.  However,   some books have been ‘loved a little too much’ to appeal to another reader.  We try our best to let sellers know what we expect on our Condition Requirements page .   So, if your book isn’t in a condition that the next reader will love too, we can’t purchase it.

Universal #3:  Survival of the fittest

In the world of books this could be rephrased as “survival of the best fitting packaging.”  Modern postal and freight transportation systems are efficient, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your book package will be treated with tender loving care from the time it leaves your door until the time it arrives at ours.  Your book will be handled, bundled, conveyor belted, sorted and resorted countless times between points A and B.  Unless your books are carefully packed in sturdy boxes using strong tape, they may arrive at Cash4Books looking like this:

If you don’t want your books to arrive looking like these we suggest following these simple steps:

• Use a sturdy box. Don’t use thin cardboard boxes (such as cereal boxes or shoe boxes), as those will not protect the books in shipment.

• If necessary, cut the box down to fit your books  and  use bubble wrap, wadded plastic grocery bags, or wadded newspaper to fill any remaining empty space after cutting the box down.  Don’t use styrofoam peanuts, as they crumble and get between pages.
• Affix your  shipping label with clear packing tape on  the top of the box.

• Use plenty of packing tape — the reinforced kind, if possible – and wrap it all the way around the box in several places.

• Keep the weight of each box under 40 pounds. While there is a weight limit of 70 pounds per box, but we advise going no more than 40 pounds per box.  Boxes over 40 pounds often result in boxes falling apart and damaged and/or lost books!

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This week the AARP published a great list of practical ways to save money around the home. The article is a part of their regular online newsletter. Some of the novel tips to save money include:

• Improving the efficiency of your freezer
• How to save money while gardening
• Which font saves the most ink
• Where to find free computer help

and

• How to earn a few extra dollars selling used books!

Check out the article by clicking here.

Thanks to the AARP for featuring us in your newsletter. It is a great honor. Tell us about the interesting ways you have saved money around around your home in the comments below.

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Take thousands of discounted books, a great staff of volunteers, hundreds of bargain-minded shoppers; add in three days of beautiful weather and one great charity and what do you get?  That’s the recipe for a very successful McKenzie Books Charity Sidewalk Sale!

Last week, McKenzie Books sold nearly 2,700 books priced at 50¢ and $1.00 to raise a total of $1,652.57 for our favorite charity, DonorsChoose.org. We’ve already sent the money we collected to help fund eleven new classroom projects for teachers who requested books and supplies.  You can see more about the projects we helped by clicking here.

Putting together an event like this took a lot of effort.  In addition to their regular work, McKenzie Books employees volunteered an additional 23 hours of their time before and after hours to the sale.  They did everything from making sure our signs were ready, to cleaning up after the sale, and boxing nearly 1,000 unsold books to go to their new home at the Beaverton Friends of the Library Book Corner.

Our staff had the privilege of meeting so many of our regular and new customers face-to-face.   We hope all of you had as much fun as we did!

As we head back to work after a weekend where we celebrated our country’s independence, it’s great a time to remember the freedom and opportunity that reading gives us.  Thanks for helping share that freedom with a new generation of students by becoming “citizen philanthropists” at our Charity Sidewalk Sale.