Auction Power Guide

I need to know about how to protect my intellectual property rights before I start selling my own original writings via eBay. I know there is a market out there, but I need tips from smart folks!

Any tips please?
Meg..and why not, miss Meg smartypants??

Meg isn’t too far off the mark. 90% of sales on eBay is done through searching for items. If I’m looking to buy a book I put in the search engine what I’m looking for. Usually by author. Look up some books on eBay and see what they are going for. Even big name authors don’t necessarily sell well.

I’ve walked down that path in the past. You may sell three or four copies…. eventually. But the time and money you have to spend hardly makes it worth the effort. Realize that eBay has fees for selling and PayPal also takes a chunk. Price your work high enough to actually make a profit and no one bids.

eBay also has strict rules about digital delivery and how such items can be listed. I take it you will try to sell ebooks? Put them on disk if you plan to list them on eBay. If you offer to email them to the winner then you have to list them as a Classified Add by eBays rules.

Protection? Forget about it. You can put copyright notices all over it and someone will still copy it and put it on the web somewhere.

It’s not IMPOSSIBLE to make money with a story you are selling yourself but it’s hard. I sold around 200 copies of a story I wrote on eBay but in order to sell it I had to change the entire story and list it in the adult section before I got a single sale. After sales began to drop I did a search and found my story had been posted on a dozen adult sites. I didn’t even bother to demand they delete them. I’d sold all I was going to at that point. I only averaged $1.02 per sale after all the fees.

Did I make a little money? Yeah, but just a little. And I had to completely rewrite the story and ruin it just so I could sell it. It also took about seven months to sell that many. I listened to my greedy side and pretty much destroyed a good story with unneeded sex just for money. I won’t be doing that again. I had to do a lot of work and lower my standards considerably for very little profit.

I know you think you can do it so give it a try. Just don’t be too disappointed if you don’t sell any copies. I have included a link to eBay’s listing policy for digital media.

In California, its almost a given. When revenues decline, Sacramento politicians raise taxes to make up the difference.

This has to end, says Meg Whitman.

Too many Californians are out of work or barely hanging on to their jobs and employers need assurances that their tax bills wont keep going up if they are ever to start hiring again.

The state sales tax is the highest in the country. The corporate tax is the highest in the West. And, according to the Tax Foundation, Californians face an annual state and local tax bill that is on average $5,028 per person.

Did you know thats about what a family of four spends on average on groceries in a year?

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