Amazon Book Sourcing Case Study: University infiltration

In this post:

• A Book Sourcing Case Study.
• FBA Mastery gets hacked? Book Sourcing Secrets leaked before it was released.

By now, you’ve already read in my first case study, of another who sources entirely through dumpsters while working just 8 hours a week.

And you’ve read my last case study, of the bookseller who made $25,000 a month sourcing entirely from recycling centers.

In this one, we’re going to hear from a far less interesting and dynamic Amazon seller: Me.

Book sourcing case study: university infiltration

Very recently I moved a block from a major university (as in, top-30-in-the-country-sized). I often stand in front of my home, look at the school, consider how many millions and millions of dollars worth of books are in it’s boundaries, and how I might get them.

The idea behind this plotting is pretty simple: A university is going to have the highest concentration of valuable books anywhere. I’m not just talking about textbooks. All university press and esoteric scholarly titles have a high likelihood of value. Additionally, professors also often receive regular review copies from publishers, etc etc. Tons of high-quality, valuable books. It’s that simple.

“Manifesting” tons of scholarly books

I’m a big believer in the power of putting yourself in situations where you want things to happen, and seeing what happens. Not exactly in a new age “manifesting” way, just in the way that your odds of experiencing good things happen in proportion to how often you put yourself places where they might happen. 

With this in mind, I started going to the university and just walking around. Waiting for an idea, or opportunity to strike. I’d do the usual routine of checking the library dumpster, and looking for pallets of throwaways on loading docks. But after a couple nights of that, nothing was really coming to me.

Then one night I was walking by one of the engineering buildings, and glanced into a ground floor office of a professor. Inside, I saw literally a thousand or more books stacked nearly floor to ceiling. He looked like a serious book hoarder. And I started pondering exactly what I might to do entice him to sell me those books.

And that’s when it hit me…

“Peter, that’s when what hit you?”

What I did next yielded me over 200 unwanted scholarly non-fiction books in one week, and an expected profit of over $2,000. The full story is in the latest case study,  Book Sourcing Case Study #3.

I’m giving the full report on this experiment here for the first time:

Download Book Sourcing Case Study #3

Download here—> Book Sourcing Case Study: University Infiltration (PDF)

If you like this case study, leave me a comment below.)

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Part II: FBA Mastery gets hacked… or something.

The most bizarre thing happened before I released Book Sourcing Secrets; I checked PayPal, and someone had bought it. It wasn’t even for sale yet, but somehow they bought it. I’m still trying to figure this out.

The purchase page was completed, but it was set to “private.” So I’m baffled.

I have to wonder if this means that someone was so frantic to get Book Sourcing Secrets, they either hacked their way around the shopping cart, or somehow reverse-engineered the URLs for my other books to bypass the purchase page and jump right to PayPal.

Whatever they did, I’m impressed.

I knew there was demand for this subject, but I didn’t expect this.

Note to all of you: I’m thrilled you’re were anticipating Book Sourcing Secrets, but please stop hacking me.

Peter