The Fire Sale

Well, after a few months of getting myself ready for this, I have finally started selling off my book collection on eBay. Months because, ironically, I started off by buying a book, "eBay 101", to learn how to get organized. Then, I was paralyzed by the idea of postal scales, ever-changing and mysterious postal rates and rules, invoices, packing slips, unhappy refund demands, whoa Nelly!
Faced with the inability to move forward in this domain, and as a Scorpio, feeling the urge to nonetheless DO something, I proceeded to pull off my shelves the books I should get rid of, and entering their ISBNs on Amazon and eBay just to see. Then, I left the books in piles on my office floor, organized by discipline but also by value, and oh by the way, would friend X like to have it? Until... my floor could no longer be navigated, first in the dark, then even in bright light. Then I had to really do something.
The new something was to badger Mike into scouting out paper-ream boxes so I could organize the books into bite-size lots, which he did. Now I had boxes of books. With lids on them.
Then I discovered that eBay had a program called Turbo Lister that allowed you to make listings offline using a questionaire form, and I downloaded it with the same enthusiasm I had bought eBay 101. And I made listings. I fell back into my officious adolescent library volunteer mode as I catalogued my books, with all their specifics, including size and weight, and then describing them with critical aplomb. Never again will I dog-ear anything, I'll just have to suffer losing my place. These virtual listings allowed me to dive further into the arcane rules of postage, which packages had to go to a counter clerk and which could get picked up, whether to add insurance or not, the relative advantages of flat-rate envelopes and boxes...
Once I had a critical mass of 50 books thus cubby-holed, finally, one night, they were uploaded. My adrenaline was rushing. The computer was, needless to say, quiet and efficient and entirely not befitting the drama of the moment. I went to bed and stewed over whether I had calculated enough in for fees of various sorts. I woke up in the middle of the night with the following thought bumping at my temples: I need to tell people I don't smoke and don't have pets!
This was three weeks ago. Since then, with 11 sales under my belt, I have fully eased into the world of eBay selling, thanks to a series of transactions which a careful mentor could not have devised better. They were progressively more difficult, and culminated today in one of my Mass Spectrometry texts, a classic, Mike and I both agreed, went off to South Korea to another beleaguered graduate student being put through his paces.
It's fun running this placement service for my books. I've sold one cookbook, four travel books, three textbooks and, yes, dog-eared and yellowed novels. Oddly, outdated editions have sold well. They've gone to every corner of the country, and now overseas. I check eBay three times a day to see how sales are going, and I find that sales pick up toward the end of the week, peaking our Sunday (I sold four yesterday). Paypal allows me to automatically print a shipping label and deduct it from the sale, and then I cut the thing out and, for the arts-and-crafts portion of the show, I get to assemble the packing slip with my note to my buyer to remember to send me feedback, fold it just so over the book cover, bubble wrap, kraft paper, tape gun. My books, old friends who have slumbered on my shelves too long, are doing the traveling for me these days. And the excitement of watching my pennies grow are addicting. I get feverish working up new listings. I look at all my stuff more critically. Maybe I do have a business bone in my body after all. My dad would be proud (but sorry I sold your entomological encyclopedia dad!)