Update on eBay status

Recently having some problems with my digital camera - suddenly puts a white spot on many of my pictures of things I'm trying to sell. From a book I scanned in Borders recently, perhaps I need a tripod and / or light box. As I move away from selling only books where I can simply enter ISBN numbers, I need to be able to reliably take pictures of my merchandise.

Also exploring some of eBay's tools such as Turbo Lister (also recommended in a book) to try to speed up the process. While I've been able to sell about half the items I put up, I usually only have a handful of items up at a time, which makes it hard to make any significant income.

My wife thinks I need to be able to bring in $500 a month to make this worthwhile, but so far my proceeds after several months is only in the $200-$300 range. Fun hobby, but that's not why I started doing this. Is there a way to speed up the pricing decision, e.g. checking previous and current sales to find out what an item has been listed at?

In addition, I sold my first item internationally - to Singapore. I didn't really intend to sell to any country, but somehow one of my items went up that way. Fortunately it was an easy item to ship, but it definitely took a bit longer to figure out the international shipping items. Guess this does open things up to a much wider audience, though.

Wishing everyone a joyous and peaceful Thanksgiving.