How I Sold 100 Books Online and Made £150 in a Weekend

There is a shelf in most homes that nobody talks about. It’s the one with the holiday paperbacks, the university textbooks, and the cookbooks that got used twice. Mine had been building for years. At some point last spring, I decided to do something about it, and by Sunday evening, I had cleared around 100 books and made just over £150 in the process.

I had no seller account, no marketplace experience, and no particular plan. What I did have was a Saturday morning and a phone. This is how the weekend went, what worked, what did not, and what I would do differently if I were starting again.

Starting With a Sort: Three Piles, Twenty Minutes

Before scanning anything, I went through every book on the shelf and divided them into three groups. The first was titles I felt confident had some value: recent non-fiction, cookbooks, craft guides, and a few specialist titles I had picked up over the years. The second was books I was not sure about and wanted to check. The third was anything clearly too worn, too marked, or too obscure to be worth the effort.

Condition matters more than I expected. Anything with a cracked spine, heavy pen markings, or water damage went straight into the third pile without checking. The buyback process involves a condition check on arrival, so sending books that are unlikely to pass just creates more work later.

The specialist titles stood out quickly. Cookbooks, a few hiking guides, and a craft manual I had forgotten I owned all went into the first pile. These categories tend to attract higher payouts and a lower rejection rate than general fiction, which meant my first pile was smaller but more likely to generate a decent return.

Scanning the Barcodes and Getting Offers in Seconds

With the first pile sorted, I opened the WeBuyBooks app and started scanning. WeBuyBooks is the UK’s largest book buyback service, having paid out over £38m to sellers and processed more than 28 million items, and the 4.6-star rated app shows why. The instant ISBN valuation is genuinely fast. You point the camera at the barcode, the app reads it, and an offer appears within a second. No listing to write, no marketplace overhead, and no waiting for someone to show interest. I could sell books online in the UK at WeBuyBooks without creating a seller account or setting a price for a single title.

Some books came back with no offer, which was not a surprise. A few paperback thrillers and some older fiction titles returned zero. I set those aside and kept scanning. The ones that did generate offers varied quite a bit. A couple of cookbooks came back at several pounds each, the craft manual did well, and the hiking guides were lower but still added up.

Once I accepted the offer, a free collection e-mail was generated automatically. No postage costs, no trip to a printer, and no fees to worry about. I packed everything into two boxes that afternoon and arranged a courier collection for the following morning.

What Happened With the Books That Had No Barcode

A small number of books in my collection had no ISBN at all. An old illustrated nature guide, a privately printed local history pamphlet, and one hardback I had always assumed might be a first edition. These sit outside the standard scanning process, and a barcode app cannot price them.

For these, WeBuyBooks has the Antiquarian Team, a dedicated human appraisal service for books without ISBNs, rare titles, and potential first editions. The process involves email submission: you send details including author, title, edition, publication date, and condition, along with photographs. A human appraiser reviews everything before making an offer.

I sent off details for the hardback I was uncertain about. The response came back within a few days. It was not a first edition as it turned out, but the process was clear, and the feedback was useful. For anyone with genuinely rare material, this route is far more reliable than guessing at a price or listing on a general marketplace and hoping for the best.

Posted on Monday, Paid by Tuesday

The courier arrived with labels and collected both boxes on Monday morning. I did not need to be there for long and did not need to take anything to the post office. By Tuesday afternoon, payment had landed in my account via next working day bank transfer. The total came to £152, which was more than I had expected when I started sorting on Saturday.

That speed was one of the things that surprised me most. I had assumed selling books online meant waiting a week or more for payment to come through. The next-day payment once books are checked makes a real difference, particularly if you are clearing space and want to see the results quickly rather than waiting on a marketplace sale that might take weeks.

The whole process from first scan to payment took less than four days. Most of that was transit time. The actual work, the sorting and scanning, took a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.

The Books That Did Not Sell and Where They Ended Up

Not everything generated an offer. Around twenty books came back with zero value. This is normal and worth accepting before you start, rather than being disappointed at the end.

For the ones I still had at home that returned no offer during scanning, I sorted them into two further groups.

Good-condition fiction and general interest titles went to a local charity shop. A few badly marked or damaged books went into the paper recycling.

Nothing needed to go back on the shelf. That was the point. Whether a book was sold, donated, or recycled, it left the house. By Sunday evening, the shelf was clear, the boxes were ready for collection, and the whole weekend had taken far less time than I expected.

A Clear Shelf and £150 by the End of the Weekend

The process is simpler than it looks from the outside. Sort by condition and category first, scan what you can using the app, set aside anything unusual for separate review, and let the service handle collection and payment. The specialist titles did better than the general fiction, which is worth knowing before you start.

If you have a shelf that has not been touched in years, a free afternoon is genuinely enough to get through it. The scanning is fast, the postage is covered, and payment arrives the next working day after your books are checked.

The £150 was a bonus. The empty shelf was the point.

FAQs

Can you sell books that are slightly damaged or marked?

Minor signs of use are often permitted. Extensive annotations, torn pages, or significant spine damage tend to result in rejection during the inspection stage. Checking the condition guidelines before sending gives a clearer picture of what is likely to be accepted.

How long does it take to receive payment after posting your books?

After your books reach WeBuyBooks and pass the condition check, payment is issued as a next working day bank transfer. In most cases, funds arrive within one working day after processing.

What happens to books that are not accepted after the condition check?

Any book that does not meet inspection requirements will either be returned (if valued at over £3) or recycled, depending on the service terms.