Comic Book Reselling: How to Flip Comics on eBay for Fun and Profit

By Don A Lashomb

This how-to guide gives tips and strategies for buying and reselling comic books on eBay and Amazon. With an eye toward "trading up" and using your profits to grow your personal collection, this ebook provides practical advice as well as anecdotes from the author's personal experience. Learn how to keep FUN at the forefront of your hobby by avoiding common pitfalls and making smart purchases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Don A Lashomb
• Release date: Jul 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370220090

Don A Lashomb

donalashomb[at]gmail[dot]com

Book preview

Comic Book Reselling:

How to Flip Comics on eBay for Fun and Profit

By Don A Lashomb

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 Don A Lashomb

(Last Revision May 2020)

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

1. A word on speculation

2. General info—to be taken à la carte

3. Not for experts, but informed amateurs

II. Before You Start

1. Learn how to accurately grade comics

2. Take pictures

3. Getting paid

III. Understand the Value of What You're Buying (and Selling)

IV. Searching eBay to Buy Comics

1. To be more specific...

2. After winning or buying...

V. Finding Out What's Hot

1. Using eBay to find out what's hot

2. Make a list

3. In closing

VI. Before You Sell: Finding Out Market Value

VII. Selling on eBay

1. Buy-It-Now and price-point

2. Auctions

3. Selling by the lot

VIII. Speculation Selling: Timing Things Right, Avoiding False Advertising

IX. Selling on Amazon.com

X. Shipping

1. Setting shipping options

2. Buying shipping

XI. How to Bag and Pack

1. Bagging and boarding

2. Packing

XII. When Something Goes Wrong with a Sale

XIII. Trading and Selling to Local Stores

XIV. Final Tips

XV. Closing

Notes

About the Author

Introduction

This guide is for fans looking to get the most out of their comics: the comics they have, the comics they can find for cheap, and the comics they are willing to sell in order to get more money to buy more comics. Though the author has nothing against long-term investors or short-term speculators, the contents are geared toward helping more casual hobbyists buy and resell—or flip—comics for fun. The goal is to use any profit to buy other comics that you want more than the ones you sold: to increase your personal collection for its own sake. This is not a guide for big-time investment purposes; it is not part of a masterful plan to make a fortune in short order. Rather, though there is surely money to be made, this guide is about having a good time with the hobby and using the opportunities you have around you—based on the shops and resources you have access to—to get the most out of your comic collecting habit and grow your collection in the process.

It should be stated upfront that this guide is by no means a be-all, end-all, one-stop resource with all the answers anyone could ever want. Just as the values of certain comics rise and fall over time, sometimes varying greatly from month to month, the strategies in this guide may not work as well for you going forward as they’ve worked for me in the recent past. Not only are our circumstances different, but sometimes there are changes beyond anyone’s control; certain buying and selling tactics that are useful today may no longer be valid in the future. For example, in a section below I recommend that you try to set your shipping parameters so that a single comic can go out via First Class mail for less than $4—but next month the Post Office may change their pricing in a way that makes this setup impossible. (Nonetheless, to make your listings more attractive to buyers, you may still want to set your First Class pricing at $3.99, even if it costs you $4.55 to ship.)

What I have done here is simply compile all of my personal techniques for buying and selling comics. Many collectors are extremely proud and protective of their own approaches to the hobby, but I will stress that this guide is that of a self-proclaimed amateur. Take these techniques for what they are worth to you. To me, at least, they have been good enough to help me go from a modest collection, with a handful of key issues, to an absolutely enormous and impressive collection, with virtually every Modern and Copper Age key issue (and multiple copies of many of them), many Bronze Age keys, a few Silver Age keys, some of these being certified signed and graded, and complete or near-complete runs of several classic series—all for the price of…nothing, except time. By making wise purchases and flipping them to fund further acquisitions, my collection has basically paid for itself. And this guide will tell you how I did it.

A word on speculation

Comic book speculation understandably gets a bad rap. To this day it is still associated with certain delusional buying practices prevalent in the early 1990s, when fair-weather fans would each buy anywhere between two and two hundred copies of mega-hyped stories such as The Death of Superman. These folks thought they’d get rich, but then they exited the market en masse once they saw these same hugely overprinted comics begin to appear in discount bins only a few years later. Many copies were sold, but many more were printed, and demand did not exceed supply for very long. The subsequent contraction of the comic book industry in the late ’90s could be the subject of an entire book in its own right. In my opinion, the crash had somewhat less to do with speculators and somewhat more to do with awkward changes and unpredictable disturbances in distribution: Marvel buying Heroes World, DC going exclusive with Diamond, and the sad demise of the newsstand market for comic books in general. Still, the perception persists that everything nearly fell apart because of sellers and resellers trying—and often failing—to figure out which comic books would be more valuable tomorrow than they were today. My advice is: Don’t repeat their mistakes.…Don’t shell out $100 to purchase twenty copies of a new #1 issue on its day of release, pinning your hopes on being able to resell them for $100 each.…But, on the other hand, don’t be so shy and prejudiced against anything remotely resembling speculation that you pass up great buying opportunities.

The stereotypical understanding of the ’90s boom and bust has caused many comic fans to be quite mistaken about the actual dynamics and rationale of the resale market. They simultaneously contend: A) That no Modern Age (1992-present) comics are, or should be, worth much of anything, and B) That anything even remotely resembling speculation is totally evil. On both counts they speak from ignorance and paint with a broad brush. There is a difference between, on the one hand, speculative or inflated value and, on the other hand, real values based on true appreciation for the art form, its history and story content. It is up to every comics consumer, even the ones who only purchase new monthly issues, to have an idea of what is and isn’t worth spending money on. If you are someone who willingly pays for dozens of $3.99 or $4.99 issues every month while also contending that modern comics shouldn’t be worth anything, then you should not be looked to for advice on how to spend money wisely. It is worth pausing and underlining this phenomenon: Many of the know-it-alls who scoff at high prices for recent back issues are the same consumers who pay a lot of money for their weekly pull-lists, even though most of the new comics they buy each week will become dollar-bin fodder a few months later. Relatedly, there is the archetype of the addicted fan who continues to buy and complain about Marvel and DC comics month after month, year after year, decade after decade, simply out of habit. If you often consider what you’re buying to be depreciative, either in monetary or artistic value, then kindly refrain from advising others on how to invest their time, money, and attention. If on the other hand you actually enjoy what you’re reading and buying, and if you can make your comics purchases work for you by selling some of them to fund your hobby and grow your collection—then you might be onto something.

Some comics fans have an almost puritanical revulsion concerning the phenomenon of Modern Age comic books being bought and sold for more than cover price. More often than not, these people simply do not understand the laws of supply and demand. After living through the doldrums of the ’00s, they underestimate the excitement and demand that really are present in the comic book collectors market of more recent years. People care about acquiring key issues, famous covers, first appearances—and they care about completing their runs of certain titles. In many, many cases there are more people interested in a certain comic today than there were yesterday—and there will be still more