Because I’m a woman with many side hustles and hobbies, I enjoy going to estate sales and auctions on weekends, buying up old books that range in price from free to one dollar, and then reselling them on the internet for as much as $700. It’s a strangely profitable hobby.
I’ve found first editions Dickens and Hemingway. I’ve sold huge sets of imperfect books to movie sets. My little Etsy shop is currently selling a set of Kipling books with his signature and some Bobbsey Twins books. I’ve been super busy for the past six months and haven’t had time to upload new inventory, but I still got three orders over the weekend. I’m coasting off work that I did creating those listings years ago.
I could never operate a hobby bookstore in real life. The doors of the shop would have to be open full time just to pay the rent on a place. My customers would be limited to folks who walked in the front door. It would be a lovely shop that smelled of old books and coffee, but it would make absolutely no money.
In contrast, my Etsy shop caters to the random person in Montana who, for some mysterious reason, really wants a history book about New York civil war gravestones. With a google search, he finds me, clicks the order button, and that book is in the mail to a ranch in Montana by the end of the day.
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Apt. 11d 
Etsy is getting worse as far as I can tell. Not that the good stuff isn’t there, but there’s so much more garbage that you need to filter through. Amazon is close to unusable for comparison shopping or browsing. Even if you have a specific thing you want, Amazon has so many dubious sellers that you have to watch. And google search results have been getting worse over the past year.
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I’ve pretty much stopped buying clothes on Amazon. The quality of the stuff is really bad.
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I bought some specialty groceries on Amazon, something my mom really wanted but couldn’t find. Two of the four cans were dented, one seriously enough to raise concerns about botulism or whatever. But you can’t return food or get a refund (or at least they made it hard enough that it wasn’t worth it for me to get 15 bucks back). Very annoying. I will still get the occasional book, but try to keep that as rare as I can.
I really hope the monetizing of your work on autism pans out. It seem like it would – colleges are just starting to jump on the bandwagon. At a recruiting event I spent quite a while talking to a prospective student with autism who was very interested in hearing how our university handled disability accommodations and our new work on creating rooms for people with needs for quiet space. So I hope that both a) students/parents are going to be more vocal about their needs and preferences; and b) colleges will respond accordingly!
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They sent me a bear canister that was clearly a returned defective product. The assholes.
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What’s a “bear canister?”
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It’s a heavy plastic can to keep your food from bears when you are backpacking. The idea is that, lacking thumbs, bears can’t open things people can. The problem was, the one they sold me wasn’t opening even with thumbs and a screwdriver.
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lol got it!
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Thanks. I’m pretty much working full time on this right now. I’m plowing my way through a book rough draft. Tons of local organizing. I think it’s the right topic at the right time.
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