With the economy being a bit sluggish, you may be looking for some ways to make a little extra cash for holiday gifts. Here’s an idea you might not have thought of.

If you have old school papers moldering away on computer disks, in boxes at your parent’s house, or just sitting on your hard drive, you may want to consider selling them online. Book reports, term papers, research papers, thesis paper, etc are all options. After all, you did the work, so why not reap the benefits?

Now there are two ways to go about selling your old school work. The first way to go about is on shaky moral ground. There are hundreds of sites out there that buy and sell terms papers. This is shaky on a moral level because they sell these term papers to students in high school, college and grad students. These sites can pay either per paper or based on a percentage of the final sale price and usually sell for about $5 to $10 each. A quick Google search leaves you with hundreds of options to choose from. Just upload your paper and you are done.

Now, if you are feeling uncomfortable about selling your papers to cheating students, another option is to sell them as eBooks on a site like Lulu, Bonanzle, Amazon Shorts or Kindle or CreateSpace. This may involve some rewriting on your part to make your old work sound like a timely eBook but in this case you can set your price and all the terms of the sale yourself. Lulu.com will automatically convert the doc format to a PDF for you but you should be able sell the file no matter what format it is as long as it’s a common format. I would recommend from past experience selling eBooks online that you offer the book in multiple formats to unsure the greatest interest level in your content.

I have recycled some of my old school work as blog posts and eBooks myself but have never tried using one of the term paper selling sites. Coming soon I hope to have a guest blogger who can give us more info on the process of selling on Kindle and Amazon Shorts but if any of you have experience buying or selling terms papers, I would appreciate your tips below.