It was 2019, I was living in my first apartment ever in Nashville, TN. I felt like a boss. I thought I was living in a luxury apartment just because it had a nice pool. Rent was expensive, for me. Mentally this was the push I needed to step out of my comfort zone and start making more money.

My business wasn’t making crazy money yet, but it was about to take off big time that August when textbook season hit.

During this time one of my main focuses was to stay in touch with every “rich” person I met in the Amazon space. This meant anyone who was making 6 figures + a year (I have raised my standards for what “rich” means since then … lol).

These people knew something I didn’t. And I knew that I was the average of the five people I surrounded myself with, and in 2018 I abided by that cliche phrase like it was my religion.

During one of these calls with my “mentors”, who was a bulk book seller (I’ll keep his name anonymous for privacy) we were discussing whether or not to trust people.

I was explaining to him how I rented a storage unit and was taking all my dud books to McKay’s Used Bookstore for store credit. I would leave the key under a rock near the storage unit and have people open the storage unit and take a few boxes of books at a time to the bookstore nearby for trade credit. I would pay people a percentage of whatever McKay’s paid us for the books they brought.

So if they got $100, I think I paid them around $60 and kept $40 for myself or something like that.

I would literally get a few thousand in trade credit per month from this store for books that were worthless on Amazon.

Anyway… on one of our calls he voiced his opinion on me leaving the key under the rock so anyone could access my storage unit at any time, and said something along the lines of make sure I don't get stolen from. “I’ve never been stolen from in my life”.. I told him. Technically I got mugged in 6th grade on my way home from the bus, but I don’t count that. It was just $6. I consider that being robbed … lol. Stolen from insinuates there is some deceiving and treachery involved.

“Avery, you will get stolen from…” those were the words I heard on repeat after that conversation.

Sometimes when people say things to me, I can’t get them out of my head for months. This was one of those things. Perhaps it stayed on my mind because my business was expanding, and part of a business expanding is more people being involved increasing the probability of being stolen from.

That August textbook season I cracked my first $80,000 in sales. I felt rich. That was somewhere between a 25 - 30% margin for me. Used textbooks were the new gold.

I’m gonna fast forward 1 year after that big textbook season. Life was going really well. I was living in Miami and my social media was blowing up and I was not only making good profits in my book business, but I was also making money teaching people how to sell on Amazon.

I was able to pay off all my college debt and shortly after I paid my parents back for the money they put into my college.

People knew I was doing well, and some wanted to take a piece of the pie.

So I was doing weekly webinars, these are basically free trainings where I deliver a ton of free value and then I would pitch my paid course for anyone who wanted to join at the end. Usually about 10% of people would buy my program.

A big part of making these free events successful is having testimonials from people showing this business model works.

One day, I sent an email out to my Amazon seller email list asking if anyone could send a testimonial for my free or paid content.

Within 15 minutes I got a video reply from one of my followers. It was heartfelt and emotional talking about how my free youtube content teaching him how to sell books changed his life, etc. etc. etc. I won’t get into detail about the testimonial because it’s probably still floating around on the internet.

Fast forward a few months and this guy messages me asking for money. 

Originally the request was for me to invest money in some book inventory he was about to buy. He had sent me pictures of an incredible amount of books from a bookstore owner and wanted capital to buy them.

Then the story changed to he needed money for his dog. It was about to die and he needed to take it to the hospital. I was texting him when I was on a plane and it was about to take off. Long story short, I sent him $1200 in agreement he would send that same amount back.

I never saw that money again… lol. Flashback to the conversation with my mentor in 201… “you will get stolen from…”.

Hopefully no one here needs to hear this, but don’t loan money to strangers on the internet.

Before I dive into this story I need to give some background on one of my businesses. I run a website called restrictedinventory.com where I sell “popular” textbooks for other sellers on accounts that can sell them.

In the early days of starting RestrictedInventory.com, I would partner with any stranger who had an account that could sell “Popular Textbooks”.

Only accounts that were active before 2017 and sold textbooks were allowed to be ungated in Popular Textbooks. Basically, these accounts were “grandfathered” into selling textbooks.

However, just because an account can sell textbooks today doesn’t mean it will be able to sell textbooks tomorrow. There is a law firm that does test buys for “counterfeit” books, and if they claim your account is selling books that are fake, your account will get shut down and when you reactivate it, you will no longer be able to sell Popular Textbooks.

Also, RestrictedInventory.com uses a legit account that is approved by both the law firm and Amazon to sell Popular Textbooks. So if you choose to send your textbook inventory to RestrictedInventory.com, you can trust that your inventory is being sold on a safe account.

Okay, I give you all this information so you have the context to understand this story.

At the time, I partnered with one of my followers on social media (this is how most of my business ventures start these days, lol) and we agreed that he would sell some textbooks on his account and send me the majority of the Amazon payout, taking a percentage for himself.

Well, fast forward a year into the relationship and I stopped getting payouts. I continued to pay my clients at Restricted Inventory for their items sold, but I never received payment from him.

First the reason was he didn’t have wifi to send payment. Then it was his assistant didn’t send payment after he told her to. Then it was Paypal froze his funds.

Finally his excuse was his Amazon account was shut down.

And his account really did get shut down. We knew this would happen eventually, all accounts that can sell Popular Textbooks will get shut down after they get test buys from the law firm.

I decided to just let him keep the money he owed me because I kinda did get his Amazon account suspended. But I also did warn him.

I learned a big lesson here. 

If someone gives you 5 different reasons for not paying you, they’re just looking for excuses to hold your money.

In highschool I remember telling my cross country coach why I couldn’t make it to practice one day. 

First I said “I can’t make it to practice because X REASON” … He paused to think. I broke the silence… “And I also can’t make it because X BETTER REASON.” He replied, “Well which one is it?” I remember thinking why the hell did I say 2 reasons. They were both true, but it made it sound like I was full of shit.

From my experience, liars will pivot and give you different reasons why they can’t pay you until one of the reasons really lands with you.

This last story will be a huge lesson for many beginner booksellers. Intermediate to advanced sellers, you have probably already experienced this form of “robbery”.

I put “robbery” in quotations because technically this guy didn’t steal from me. But he knew what he did.

I saw a Craigslist ad in the Chattanooga section for a TON of books. The description hooked me, and in hindsight this should have been the biggest red flag. 

It said something like this:

“Books great for Amazon sellers to sell. Average profit $3-10 per book”.

I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember the description was targeting Amazon sellers. Naive and hungry Amazon sellers like myself.

This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up on. The books were only $3,000 (I didn’t have the money at the time for this, but I knew if there’s a will, there’s a way).

I called one of my mentors and explained the situation. He didn’t look much into it and he sent me $3,000.

I went and rented another storage unit and the Chattanooga craigslist dude told me he would be there the next day.

He arrived sweating with a box truck a dolly. We spent an hour unpacking the old shitty worthless books out of his box truck into the storage unit. 

We packed that baby to the brim.

After he unloaded everything he said he’ll be back tomorrow.

That’s when my internal bullshit detector started to go off. Why would this grown ass man drive 2.5 hours four times just to make $3000. Couldn’t he have found a local buyer if the books were really that good?

These books were absolute trash. 

They were a liability. I paid a man and his family (hired them from my Instagram following lol) to process all the books out of my storage unit (I think I ended up paying them like $2,000 out of my own pocket). I paid the whole family of 5 like $30 an hour collectively to scan through the books.

These books ended up having a gross profit of less than $600 on Amazon. Even McKay’s didn’t want these books, lol.

Despite the prosperity of the situation, I did feel like the shit for being able to be the boss of someone else. I told them what to do, and they listened. I had a real business with systems, it just wasn’t making any money.

Back to the Chattanooge crook. Was it stealing? Technically, no.

Did he know he was unloading a pile of trash on a new bookseller? Most definitely. I’ll let you be the judge if I was stolen from or not. But I am truly grateful for the lesson I learned.

Wow, that was a long blog post. Kinda therapeutic. 

If anyone read this far and enjoyed it, let me know. You can reply below or message me on any social media @romertheroamer. 

Remember I have two free step by step courses:

starthumble.com - Make your first $1000 in 7 days selling used books on Amazon

oneasinaway.com - A 30 day online arbitrage challenge course to get your first $1000 in profit