Selling magazines and patterns
 

I have A LOT of quilting agazines, some patters nanda books I want to sell. How do I price them fairly? Want to include postage in price be easier for me..
Thanks

Might check eBay, Craigslist, and other online shops to see what the going rate is for those items. I honestly don't see how you could include pricing without knowing the final weight and destination of your shipments. You will get some people who will buy 50 lbs worth and have you ship it 1000 miles, vs people who buy a single magazine and have you ship it 20 miles. Postage will vary.

The Quilting Board "Yard Sale" guidelines and other members' listings may also help in pricing. You will get more "takers" with lower prices, so it depends on what you feel you need to get. Adding estimated postage, with a caveat that foreign shipments will be higher, worked for me last year.

The problem with selling quilting magazines is that they do not qualify for media shipping -- because of the advertisements in them. It doesn't matter if the ads are old or out-of-date. This makes shipping costs much higher than, say, for books. I ended up donating my magazines to various "friends of the library" groups. They collect donations and then hold a book sale once or twice a year with proceeds going to the library fund.

An easy way to price books is to go to Amazon and search on the ISBN of the book you have. Look at the "used books" for sale to see what you could charge for the book in its current condition. I found that many of my quilting books are sold for just a penny or so; people actually make a little money on the postage (usually $3.99 on Amazon, I think). It's quite a bit of work to wrap and ship a book at a time, though. You have to decide what your cut-off point is for selling a book. For some people it might be a penny, but for me it's around $10; otherwise it's just not worth the hassle to me. I donated a lot of books to the "friends of the library" too.

You can also check book prices at half.com (which is part of eBay now). It's pretty easy to list books at both websites.

Patterns are probably easiest to sell on eBay.

Edit: Forgot to mention the SewItsForSale and Quilter's Flea Market groups at groups.yahoo.com . It's free to join, but you have to set up a Yahoo ID! in order to join these and other groups. These groups do not charge anything. You list what you want to sell and the price, upload a photo if you want, and then you deal directly with interested buyers.

Edit 2: Oh, and you can list individual magazines for sale on Amazon too.

I see people sell individual magazines, multiples etc. and people must be able to sell smaller quantities, but I haven't had much luck. So I wait until I have a medium flat rate box and sell them that way. Then I sell them on Ebay because I never know what they are worth and I figure the highest bidder will tell me what they think they are worth. My box usually contains older magazines up to recent. Since magazines are heavy, the buyer has to figure shipping into their costs. I am just happy to send them on to someone who will be able to get more life out of them.

I give my old magazines to a quilting friend--after I remove any patterns that I want to make. She knows that I do that and is OK with it. I also get her a gift subscription to any magazines that she likes--that way we each only pay 1/2 price. I don't know what she does with them, and I don't care. I can't bring myself to throw them away and don't have room to keep them. I told her to pass them on or throw them out. She doesn't tell me what she does with them so I don't have to feel guilty. Works for me.
Sue