Alternative Routes for Selling Your Used Books and Clothes

Online services now offer alternative methods for smaller businesses and it's important to understand the various ways to distribute different items online.

New and Used Clothes
There are many ways for clothing merchants who sell new and used clothes to promote their business. If the clothing or jewelry is gently used, there are plenty of online services available to sell the clothing for you. Some charge a commission fee on top of whatever you choose to as the price to post on the website. Users of the service are able to browse it easier, knowing that the company has strict guidelines as to what is able to be sold on their website and users can buy with confidence.

If you're interested in doing it yourself, consider setting up your own personal web store with an inventory of all the clothing or items you would like to sell. This reduces the hassle of dealing with an outside source, and you're able to customize every aspect of what the customer sees, from the description of the clothes, to the images available for display. One thing that secondhand clothes sellers love to do is hire personal stylists to come to his or her home and pick out the clothing that has the highest potential to be sold online. These stylists have the knowledge and experience to accurately price your secondhand clothing and statistics show that these stylists increase the chance a secondhand retailer successfully sells their clothing by 35 percent.

Buying and Selling Books
Reading material, books, and eBooks will always be in popular demand by consumers. There are plenty of physical and online book stores that provide new books, but not all of them have a used book sales option. Developing a web shop for your used books seems like a large hassle without much of a gain, and that's because it is. Online retailers are starting to offer people trade in options for their books. These same retailers are also allowing users to post there books online free of charge to be bought. A potential buyer has the option to browse through hundreds of user's personal libraries to see the books that they don't want anymore. This service can also be used by authors who want to distribute their own book without dealing with a publisher or outside distributor.

Another type of book that many people have trouble selling are used textbooks. The good thing about text books is that they are generally valued and reusable. The knowledge that you gained from a textbook at one point may be potential knowledge for a future reader. It's important to first determine the overall value of your secondhand textbook. If pages are missing and there is evidence of spilled coffee on the cover, the value goes down significantly. However, a study by HowStuffWorks.com states that the majority of secondhand textbooks are sold have only been used by one or two owners, and the books themselves are in good shape.

After determining the value, look up the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) online to get an idea of what other people are selling the book for. If there is a big gap in the pricing of the textbook, this usually is an indication of quality. Determine the overall popularity and ranking of the book at major websites and then find an appropriate seller for your book. There are plenty of services that offer the ability to present your used books for sale, and just charging commission for each sale.

The Camomile Lawn

Mary Wesley has been on my 'to read' list for a very long time. I knew that she didn't have her first book published until she was in her 70's and that she'd had amazing success after this, her 'breakthrough' novel. (Written after the death of her second husband left her destitute.) So when I saw it on the library shelf last month I grabbed it.

Written in 1983, the language is obviously not quite contemporary, but see past that and you will find a beautifully crafted novel, full of surprises, twists and turns, which will keep you guessing until the end. The novel begins in 1939, as World War 11 is about to break out. The setting is a house in Cornwall, high above the sea, that possesses a fragrant camomile lawn in the garden. It is this that provides the unusual title. There are quite a number of main characters who interact in many and varied ways, producing some convoluted and often illicit, relationships: five cousins (Calypso, Walter, Polly, Oliver and Sophy), their Aunt and Uncle (Richard and Helena), identical boy twins, sons of the local Rector, who become friends with the cousins, and a husband and wife - Austrian Jewish Refugees who assume an increasingly important role as the story unfolds.

Wesley drew on her own childhood and work experiences in building some of the characterisations - like 'Polly', she worked for military intelligence during the war.

As well as being evocative of the time, and full of humour, this is one very sexy, naughty, book, and this is all the more amazing given that there is not a single description of 'the act'. Somehow Wesley, with her mature, crisp and uncensored imagination pulls off this difficult feat. She paints a very vivid picture of life in wartime, and the loosening of moral codes that occurs as a result of stress, opportunity, or perhaps a sense of 'well, we may not be here tomorrow so why ever not?'

By the end of the book, those characters who are still alive are 40 years older and through them, centered around attendance at a funeral, we find out some of the back-story, and the answers to the many questions we were still asking of the author and hoping wold not be left unanswered before the final page was turned. This book is a great read, and for me, as a professional writer, a study in clean dialogue, not weighed down by all the superfluous 'she said/he wondered/I asked myself and similar phrases that litter so many novels today.

Americanah - By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I stumbled on this book after a brief conversation about literature with a Nigerian friend. After reading it I once again found the answer to the question "why read", and in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discovered a mind far more profound and original than most. Like most great works this powerful book afflicts us with many human sensations that are conveyed in simple language.

Princeton in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.

Thus with beguiling language, and with every sentence and chapter the reader can smell the world, with its alien and unpleasant presences, that Chimamanda describes

The book is a majestic and colossal edifice that follows the lives of two young Nigerians through their trials of youth, life abroad and the return to their homeland. Obinze is the son of a professor: a caterpillar that very slowly becomes a rich butterfly. And then there is his lover, Ifemelu. The latter is the main and compelling protagonist in the story.

When one encounters her, one has to alight and linger. Ifemelu is witty, a strong and a wild spirit. She is a heroine in the traditional sense. She can be loving and cold-hearted, submissive and predatory. She is intelligent, caring, and courageous. She can be an enchantress that can reduce a man into a docile slave. She takes a very big bite of life, and savours and survives both the good and the bad.

There are other minor characters that convey to us the various transactions and challenges of life. There is "Chief", the lecherous tycoon who occasionally dishes out favours to the sycophants around him. The other is "Aunty Uju", the dutiful, calculating and amiable single mother and her vain search for love.

Then there is the tennis coach who wants to be kept warm twice a week. He is an unconscionable sex-monster who conscientiously covers the train fare for his female comforters. This is the man a penniless Ifemelu briefly turns to when she desperately needed a job. Alone, and away from home she had to make choices, and that meant she sometimes had to accept life in whatever terms it submitted itself. At the time she was so broke that she even went into a murderous rage when a friend's dog ate her bacon.

The book therefore successfully grapples with the confusion and deep sorrow of being torn away from a society from which one has all one has always drawn one's strength, and making peace with a foreign culture and its values. It also exposes the cynicism of those Nigerians who were returnees from western expeditions, to some of the practices in their homeland: a partial dislocation of an émigré from his own roots. And for some of the characters it is because of these challenges that they finally discover who they really are.

Much as the story is about the forces that change humans and their societies, Chimamanda shows her dazzling qualities as a writer by delving deep into the emotional life of her characters. Love, as in life, has a very privildged place in the book. While most reasonable people would bet against love surviving, Chimamanda elevates it to its rightful throne.

Americanah is an epic drama that is a mirror of life. It is a symphony of language in which upon every word is displayed the imagination, craftsmanship and the genius of a young African writer who is a great student of life. It is a book that demands and deserves a re-read.

Long after completing this uncannily beautiful story, which has one in a spell throughout, it continues to administer delight to the reader in its manifold forms.