25 Books I've Sold On Amazon For $100+: Lessons On Spotting Profit

I profile 25 books I’ve sold for $100 or more, and share lessons on why each one was valuable. Welcome to a massive guide to how to spot profitable books to resell.

In this article: hide

1 The article so long, I turned it into a book

2 What you’re about to learn

3 Why the value of books is not random

4 What this guide is, and what it is not

5 I lied: These books have sold for $99 or more

6 How I compiled this list of profitable books

7 So are these 100 books you can sell for $100 right now?

8 Notes to better understand this guide

9 Your homework (an exercise in spotting profitable books)

10 The List: 25 Books I’ve Sold On Amazon For $100 (or more)

11 How to use these lessons to boost your Amazon book profits

12 Going Further: 100 books I’ve sold for $100 (ebook)

The article so long, I turned it into a book

The original idea for this article was to profile 100 books I’ve personally sold for $100 or more. So I curated a long list, wrote the entire article, and typed out all the lessons over many days. And it was then I came to one realization:

No one is going to read an article this long.

So I did something I haven’t done before: I split this into two parts:

25 books I’ve sold for $100+ (this article).
100 books I’ve sold for $100 (I took the unedited article and put it into a 100+ page ebook).

Download the full ebook here (or read the first 25 below):

What you’re about to learn

$100+ Sales From My Personal Account: I profile 25 books that sold for huge profits – and explain why they were profitable.
A Guide To Seeing Profitable Inventory: For each book, you get an actionable lesson on what made the book profitable, so you can learn to spot profit when sourcing.
Why I consider this the “Missing Link”: The ability to hone in on that 0.01% of profitable books and filter out the 99.9% of unprofitable books is a major factor that separates successful sellers from the unsuccessful. That’s what this guide is about.

Why the value of books is not random

With books, value is driven by principles. That’s what this guide will teach you: What patterns to look for to efficiently spot profitable books.

High value books are not random. There are reasons they are high value. And when you can spot these “drivers of value” in a split second, hone in on titles like these, and filter out the 99.99% of books that sell for under $20, you have a massive advantage as a bookseller.

Because you can rarely scan everything…

What this guide is, and what it is not

Let me explain what this guide will do for you by first establishing what this book is not.

It is not a list of 100 books that you should be on the hunt for. There’s over 40 million books on Amazon. The chance you’ll encounter any 25 books included here (or the 100 in the ebook) at any point in your life is close to zero. That’s not the point of this guide.

What this guide does provide is 100 hand-selected books that offer lessons and clues about what types of books tend to be valuable. As I call these clues “the principles of book value.”

For each book here, I offer a sentence or two about why it sold for $100. This is the most important part of this guide – the lessons on why some books hold their value (and most don’t).

**I lied: These books have sold for $99 or more**

One correction: This isn’t 25 books sold for $100 or more. It’s 100 books I sold for $99 or more. The “25 books sold for $100” title sounds better than “25 books sold for $99.” If I can sell a book for $100, I usually just list at $99.99 (or thereabouts). So I’ve sold a ton of books around the $99 mark.

Lowering the threshold to $99 increases the range of options to include in this guide dramatically. (I trust you won’t sue me for false advertising).

How I compiled this list of profitable books

To start, I went into my personal Amazon account and sorted all sold listings from highest price to lowest. But it wasn’t as simple as copying the top 100 results.

First, it turns out that sometime around 2016 I had gotten spooked by all the reports of Amazon sellers getting their account shut down for inactive listings that were now restricted (or something like that, I forget what the panic was about). So I went through and deleted most of my completed listings from that era, starting with the most expensive. This became a regrettable decision as I began compiling this guide, with so many of my high value sales lost forever to an ancient digital dumpster.

But there was still no shortage of $99+ books to distill down to a “best of.” So I went through the spreadsheet and curated the 100 books that offered the best lessons.

What remained is 100 books, each with a valuable lesson on why it was valuable. Lessons you can take and apply to your book sourcing missions.

**So are these 100 books you can sell for $100 right now?**

Let me quickly address the obvious: Prices fluctuate on Amazon. A lot. Some of the books here that sold for $200 in 2015 are selling for $10 now. That’s how Amazon works. Demand for certain books drops. Supply goes up. Etc. That’s how all marketplaces work. Over time, prices of books trend downwards. This happens as books age, and competition increases.

A list of books selling for $100 now would be obsolete in a week. That’s not what this guide is. Study the patterns, not the specific prices of specific titles.

Notes to better understand this guide

Some of these sold for a premium because they sold in New condition. When a book sold for $99+ in New condition, I tried to catch it and make note. But I’m sure I missed some.

A disproportionate percentage of these books sold for $99.99. There’s a reason for that: $99.99 is my default price when I’m the only seller of a book. About 30% of the books in this guide sold for that amount, not due to random coincidence, but because that’s how I price a book when the competition is very low or non-existent.

These are in random order (sort of ). Actually it’s not exactly random.You’ll see many books in a row that have selling prices in ascending order, followed by a run of prices in descending order, followed by 10 books that sold for $99.99, etc. It just depends on how I sorted the spreadsheet that day on the many days I worked on this project.

Your homework (an exercise in spotting profitable books)

Maximizing value from this document is simple:

Look at each book.
Ask “Why did this sell for $99 or more?”
Read the lessons below each book.

By the end, you will have a well-rounded look at these “principles of book value.”

Value is not random. It is driven by factors that can be learned. That’s what this guide is about.

Download the full guide, or read on for the first 25 books…

The List: 25 Books I’ve Sold On Amazon For $100 (or more)