Stefan_W

Picked up a collection of 150 horror comics from the early 70s. Great stuff in here. The keys are intact, but even without them these are fantastic series. Condition varies but generally 7s and 8s with a few low grade Gold Key books not shown in this photo.

I am not a store owner but I do buy collections and sell off the pieces to fund this hobby. People often dont believe me when I say that my biggest profits come from bronze and modern age books. Big books are good as showcase items, and they sell fast while drawing attention of buyers. If people know you have them in once in a while they check in regularly which makes everything you have a bit easier to sell. But the margins on GA and SA grails and keys usually suck (big dollars out, wait a bit, big dollars plus a little bit back in). You can often pick up newer books pretty cheap and make back double, triple, or quadruple what you paid for the when buying as a collection.

We all collect in our own ways. What usually happens for me is I use direct editions as placeholders in my personal collection until I can replace them with news stand editions. Once I get a news stand in the grade I want I sell off the direct to offset the costs. But if you prefer to have one of each then more power to you and happy collecting

I sell about 10-15k in comics there per year before I pull everything. This is simply because I dont want to give that site any more money than that. So nah to the store and the $22/month.

Fixed price, gave up on auctions there long ago.

Many years. The increase the other limits but have never touched the 250 unless there is some type of promotion. I remember a couple of times when they gave me an extra 250 in a month, but then I had to watch the auto-relists because I would be charged the month after if I exceeded the original 250.

Not exactly since books that did not sell would relist.

Ebay really does shoot itself in the foot sometimes. I just listed just over 250 of my lower end books and by the end it started charging me a 34 cent fee per listing. No big deal since I only had to pay for the last half dozen or so. But, I was thinking of listing about 150 signed books and minor keys as well and now I am thinking "nah, not selling anything there anyway so far this year so paying fees for that is a total waste." Why set my selling limit at over 700 books and who knows how many dollars in value if they are not just letting me list my stuff for free? The selling fee on any of those books I would have posted is likely more than they would get from a 34 cent charge per book. Anyway, /rant.

Sampling of the goodies in a collection I just bought.

Just to add 2 cents to this, the trick to BIN formats is to set a realistic price. Higher end books that are sitting in MCS BIN formats are often priced above market value. Setting reasonable asking prices and moving down a touch (at or slightly below value) for a BIN is usually a recipe for success with desirable books. Apologies for forgetting the MCS BIN option in my summary earlier in this thread. I have no personal experience with it, but I know people who have used it and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Heritage will probably realize the best prices but that site has the highest fees and customer service kind of swirls the drain for the most part. Comic Link has much lower fees but the final price for a lot of books will be well below GPA. Big keys are usually fine though. You also have the option of using their marketplace and controlling the price that way. Comic Connect is a bit of a nightmare to navigate so I have not been able to effectively use is and cant really comment beyond that. You ruled out MCS for bigger slabs so I will leave that one aside, although I think you may be surprised at well those books do there. Selling direct on the boards here is probably the best option for a first pass.

I have had similar experiences trying to sell Golden Age books. There are a small amount of buyers out there willing to sit on their wallets unless you give them a steal of a deal. The only real way to get value out of them is to send them to a large auction house, and of course with that comes a lot of fees. My gut feeling is that those who stocked up on GA books thinking they can dodge the price drops are doing ok but not as well as they may believe.

Fair enough, I apologize if I misrepresented what you were trying to get across.

The topic I brought up was restored comics that were identified as being restored on the slab, and when you look up the book in the CGC registry, but the label color was not purple. This was specific to that generation of custom labels where they were all blue. From the perspective of the topic I was bringing up (and that you cited) I do not see the issue as being the same as the current topic of a fraudulent seller duping people. Having said this I am sure a few people who were not paying attention may have paid full price for these books because they were blue label, but the info was there for them had they looked.

Yeah, for sure. I would not limit it to the auction market since fixed price listings are basically sitting. During the pandemic people were grading anything and everything because the prices were so high. Now all those books are still around but the people willing to buy have decreased in number dramatically. Not the best situation for those trying to sell comics.

I am expecting things to be pretty grim on the selling front for the first few months of the new year. Price drops were slowing a bit but still happening in 2023, and now with the CGC holder switcharoo thing buyers have yet one more reason to be cautious before forking out cash for books. I starting listing some lower end books on Ebay on Jan 1st, which I do at the start of every year. I normally hit about 10-15k in sales some point in Feb or early March at the latest and then stop (there is a limit to how much I am willing to give that site in fees each year). It is still early, but I have only sold 2 comics at about $100 each so far (compared to 10 at this point last year) even though the quality of books is similar to previous years. It is too small a sample to read too much into it so far except to say that I was expecting the worst going in and nothing that has happened so far has eased my fears.

Stuff like this made me stop using auction formats on Ebay.

Add me to the list of people who just use Excel. Easy to manipulate and a pretty powerful program if you know what you are doing. Most people do not come close to using its full potential. The downside, of course, is you cant add scans of your books into it.

Fixed it for ya

I am pretty sure it comes down to a quick cost-benefit analysis. Rolling moderns like Hulk 181s and NM 98s is pretty quick and easy, and there is a high demand for copies. SA and GA books are expensive to grade and a restoration may be spotted. The scammer is not a genius, but even as such it would not take much thought to come to the conclusion that quickly rolling select modern books is the quickest and easiest bang for the buck. Having said all of this I would not be surprised if the scammer tried pulling a switcheroo with older books a few times to test the waters. Con artists often try to be well-rounded when it comes to their craft.

Mine usually go through Q/C within a day. I see yours is a magazine though so maybe that makes a difference in the process. Just a guess.

24 book modern submission: Shipped out from Canada - Nov 23 Arrived at CGC - Nov 28 Box opened and SFG - Dec 1 Credit card charged - Dec 13 Moved to G/E/I - Dec 29 Switched to Q/C - first thing in the AM on Jan 3rd Shipping - Jan 3 @NewWorldOrder was bang on - these hit Q/C and shipment on the same day and made it under the TaT. Kudos to the folks doing all of the hard work to make sure the flow of books keeps on going

24 book modern submission: Shipped out from Canada - Nov 23 Arrived at CGC - Nov 28 Box opened and SFG - Dec 1 Credit card charged - Dec 13 Moved to G/E/I - Dec 29 Switched to Q/C - first thing in the AM on Jan 3rd

Awesome, just finished business day 19 for me so fingers crossed

If you dont mind me asking, when did that shipment hit G/E/I and Q/C?