Only had a couple hundred miles left til I reached Los Angeles, the location of the conference. 

To save money, I would eat FREE breakfast at Holiday Inn Expresses and Best Western. Through trial and error I learned those were the hotels that almost always had free breakfast. When they asked how I slept the night before, I would always say "good" (little did they know I was sleeping in my car in a Walmart parking lot... LOL).

Finally I arrived in Los Angeles and walked into the bookselling conference 30 minutes late. 

The only chair available was right next to Caleb Roth, the Youtuber and Blog author I had been following. Talk about luck. 

After seeing dozens of people at the conference sell books on Amazon as a full time gig, it really changed my perception about this whole thing. Maybe this wasn't just some side gig for homeless 20 year olds looking to travel the world on a budget. 

I started to ramp up the number of books I found each week. 

1. I put library sales in my calendar, researching their locations ahead of time on booksalefinder.com. This tactic alone doubled the number of books I found. 

Andrew Gong and I heard that Connecticut was the "Mecca"  of profitable books and we wanted to find out for ourselves. He booked a flight to Portland, Maine, and I drove to the East Coast sleeping at rest stops and truck stops in my car along the way. No money was to be wasted on a bed that could be spent on profitable book inventory.

1. Work 6 days of the week and only take 2 days for fun.

2. We needed to source at least 2000 books if we wanted to get 14,000 profit. That's around $7 net profit per book... completely do-able. 

3. We needed to batch listing. Listing is super time consuming. If we listed books every night, we would be wasting precious time we could have spent finding more profitable books. We followed Tim Ferris's productivity tip to "batch processes".

4. Scan as fast as possible. We used ScoutIQ (an app that looks up prices on Amazon and tells you the profit after Amazon fees.) 

So, we'd only list books when we were completely out of space in my Toyota Corolla (and I can fit a shit load of books in that little car... lol).

With this gameplan, we knew it was just a matter of hard work and hustle. 

We knew most of the wealth was from Boston to New York area, so we didn't linger to long in Portland. 

Once we got to Boston it was game over. We went to these small coffee shop/ used bookstores called Boomerang's and they were loaded with profit. 

Saver's thrift stores were a bit annoying to source because the employees would always put stickers over the barcode of the books making it more difficult for us to blaze through them like we could at other locations. But, most people were not willing to do the hard work of manually typing these books in, so we were able to squeeze some profit out of them.

At every thrift store we went to, we found at least one $100 book. It felt unreal. 

We dominated library sales. We would schedule out library sales we saw advertised on booksalefinder.com and get there an hour early. We were the fastest scanners by far. Because of my reputation on Instagram for being an Amazon FBA bookseller I started to get recognized in the libraries. I felt like a celebrity and got a big head lol. Who knew selling books on Amazon could be so cool.

We were always asking for backroom access. The first thing we did when we walked into a new thrift store was ask for back room access. If we could get access to the backroom, we would have access to books that no other booksellers had scanned already.