spreads

Hopefully you had a good show, we just had our monthly show and it was my personal worst. It was frustrating because I brought the most stuff out and put a free ad up the day before we some bites, but the traffic was very poor. Several dealers were griping about poor sales....oh well.

Good point. Unless you're looking for inventory why would you take on that additional burden. I have another person offering a collection, but I offered to take on a few books consignment instead. I'm still in building out my inventory at the show, so I'm not super keen on this idea, but I wouldn't mind starting off slow with a few books.

Hey Torch, Do you guys execute many trades, and how do you structure the deal if you do? I'm starting to get guys contacting me about trades...the stuff they have is decent but nothing I'd write home about. I guess my trade in value would be higher than what I would purchase the books, but an equal value trade wouldn't make much sense if I'm not actively looking for it.

Good luck, keep us posted on what happens! I imagine the guys that setup our monthly show do very well because there are many dealers that show up, a regular crop of locals and out-of-towners. And donating profits to a political cause, WTF??? Not a bad idea on getting the dealers pizza torch, I try to eat healthy but I guess it beats having to worry about packing a lunch.

Good luck....you can always move South to the big smoke and sell in the big markets! I'm lucky I have a regular, solid show very close to me that's been running for years. I don't think I would setup shop elsewhere if it folded - probably take my personal collection with me, and close off all buying/selling activity once I close out that other inventory.

Post away!

That's super , after the first one I probably would have said something to organizer.

Here's an exact quote from the VF boards, an owner of a store (two stores) when I asked his perspective on buying/offered collections... "So, our situation is even tougher than 99% of the shops I know, because ... we don't have back issue bins. We are not in the business of back issues. Books come out and sell, on the shelf, until they don't and then they go to boxes and are sold by the pound, really cheap like 50c, or are sold off to guys who buy bulk books by the boxes, 30-100 long boxes at a time. Our store is a book store, with new books and graphic novels. So we only price Key issues and sell in a couple of showcases. The rest is bulked. And our bulk has great books, we just don't care to sell them by piece. " In the Ottawa/Gatineau area there are at least 9 LCS I can think of, a few do offer back issues and one of the stores (two flagship locations) picked-up a collection for next to nothing....4800 comics for $50. Aside from the keys/semi keys the $books took a long time to sell (and I'm sure they eventually dumped them or gave them away). These stores have a great business model with their subscriptions, CCG, board games, etc. it just doesn't make sense to use up key space for inventory that might sit for a long time. This store above and the owner of the quote are both very large operations and have been in business over 20 years; sure if someone walked in with silver/golden batman books they'd buy it but they don't jump on these things like we do.

Exactly, and also for them to setup it's additional cost/resources to running their store which would also be open at the same time. Similar to not having much interest in holding back issues (buying collections), it's just not a part of their business model.

Honestly, how do these people function in their day-to-day jobs? I'm currently dealing with a realtor that hasn't figured out the 'reply-all' function yet, despite telling him many times.

Good luck, having a corner on the market is a great thing! All customers will flock to you and will only further cement your reputation....I deal with some very large local dealers that have been doing it for quite some time, so they get a lot of 'default' business.

Always better to stick to your guns! And the pool of buyers for these (in your area) I imagine would be very small, you might even be able to get it lower a year or two down the road if they're still selling (I've done that!). I just picked up another small lot; I took a flier on the two pictured books and figured at about 50-60 cents each (based on the tub size) it was a low-risk grab - $80 CAD for about 120-150 books. Loads of sets (that I've already priced-out), and a bunch of solid books that will sell in the dollar bin. Good run Uncanny, Moon Knight (issue 1) and some keys as well...the only bagkicker is I believe the woman smoked, I should have known when I saw the part of town she lived in!

I think I've seen these for less than that, pretty sure there was one for sale in Eastern Ontario for $100 not that long ago....

Great work, Watson....this jotted my memory of something crazy which happened at the last show. Apparently there's this guy who has a FB or youtube channel where he goes around buying books and selling them, ala pickers style with the price paid and profit in the webcast. I think I've met him before as a toy buyer/seller but I guess he's into anything that can make a buck. Apparently this guy was videotaping a known regular dealer and a customer of this dealer, when asked to stop he and another guy started yelling and swearing at both the dealer and customer. Then the show organizer came and this character started yelling more expletives, to the point where the organizer said he called the cops and they were banned from coming back! The whole time I'm wondering why this person would do this and what possible benefit could be had? None of us outside the main hall got to witness this, which is too bad because it would have been awesome entertainment!

Great setup! I like the cheap stuff for 25 cents each, any time I see a parent with a child I tell the kid they can grab a book out of the $1 box for free. I like having cheap sets too, I plan on having more of those.

I said to avoid garage sales that don't advertise comics....you can always try and contact garage sale listings to see if they might have comics, but to go hunting comics at random garage sales is not the way to go.

I would save yourself the hassle going to garage sales that don't advertise comics unless you happen to literally by driving by them. It might not take a lot of time to view a few here and there, but get snake-bitten 100 times and you've wasted a ton of resources.

4 for $1 seems like you would move a lot of books! Are these books that haven't sold a few times at $1 each in the past, or do you just give them one attempt to sell at $1.

I've never had an ebay listing less than $20, those are the perfect show books! Good idea not to bring books that may or may not be for sale, no risk of damage/theft.

Ebay might be better for you being in the US, but unless you're a large seller in Canada you don't get a lot of action. I would say both ebay and cons have the same on-going maintenance requirement, I'll sell the more obscure or higher dollar stuff on ebay if I want to target a bigger audience - you list it once, then your work is primarily done. The same for cons, once I have my boxes out and priced all the heavy-lifting is done - maybe just update/review prices or add books to boxes. It's bringing new stuff that takes time, same with listing new items. The major benefit with cons is that one buyer can make multiple purchases, how often do you see that with ebay (unless you're running many concurrent auctions starting at .99 cents). And as WebCrawler mentioned earlier, you start to get repeat buyers once you've become established. There are comic collectors with money that will show up to spend each month....

That makes sense, for some reason I didn't think coins and toys would fall under antiques....you should just register as an antique dealer and say all your comics are 'vintage', regardless of year produced like kijiji, lol.

Are there any antique dealers that setup on a table? Maybe they are just using the space, but I can't see how many items they can fit in that small surface area?

Also, some of us have to do shows like this to sell our doubles....why do I need 5-10 copies of the same book.

100% agree. $20 an hour seems like a pipe dream when you factor in bagging/boarding, but this is a hobby and I enjoy doing it. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't be there. And there are definitely dealers that setup (at my monthly show) that have not sold anything at all! These guys I'm sure are retired and probably have loads of time on their hands - the same crowd you see at estate sales. I've seen other dealers that complain about barely selling their costs but then you look at what they have and it's no surprise...

That's a nice book to have, I have a beauty in my 'to do' grade pile that I'm confident will be 9.6-9.8. I believe the price on preachers have actually come down quite a bit off their highs last year?