I have the opportunity to catalogue a client’s 12,000 size book collection. How much should I charge. 6 6

[Snowdon]

Wow thread blew up. Thanks for the amazing replies.

My plan of attack is: see the collection this weekend.

Have different tiers of work at different price points:

Tier 1 is straight up cataloguing and data entry at price point x 

Tier 2 is grading, as well as cataloguing at price point y.

Wish me luck 🍀 

[Upgrayedd2]

On 11/1/2022 at 3:24 PM, KCOComics said:

Do you plan to take them out to grade them or just give an approximation based on the cover? 

 

I bought a 5k comic book collection a few years ago and my brother and I had to bag, board, grade and record every issue (using excel).  It's time consuming!  Though having them bagged and boarded is a big plus. 

I would think of it as a labor of love.  I would probably charge them a 1 time of fee of a few hundred bucks (or some nicer comics you might want) and have them throw in pizza and beer.

It won't be a good financial return on your time, but I look at it as one collector helping another. 

KCO,

Please do let me know when you have some spare time. I would gladly pay you a few hundred bucks to grade and catalog my collection. And, I would provide pizza and beer at the end of each work day. Not during. Don't want any of that grease on my comics.

[KCOComics]

On 11/2/2022 at 10:19 PM, Upgrayedd2 said:

KCO,

Please do let me know when you have some spare time. I would gladly pay you a few hundred bucks to grade and catalog my collection. And, I would provide pizza and beer at the end of each work day. Not during. Don't want any of that grease on my comics.

What's sad is, if you were close enough, I would probably do it lol.  Like i said, it's a labor of love. I enjoy this stuff. 

I'd even spare you the cost of Pizza! But you might have to deal with a kid or two running around while I work. 

[media_junkie]

On 11/2/2022 at 4:29 PM, shadroch said:

You aren't looking to cherry pick the collection. Your job is to catalog each and every book, regardless of its value.  If the books are alphabetical, I suspect many of you would not get past the As. 

A few years ago I took my personal collection from 60 long boxes down to 20 long boxes.  So I went through and verified, graded, made a database of the 40 boxes that I was selling (with a price I wanted).  I hated it and wanted to light them all on fire after dong 20 of the 40 boxes.  It was a slog and took me quite a few months of working 2 to 3 hours a night after dinner.  I would never do that for someone else.  I am going to agree with Shadroch here, if they are not your own comics you are going to hate this job.

[Stefan_W]

I bought a collection two years ago that had about 4000 comics. The person I bought it from paid someone to do an inventory of the books and type out a list, but it did not include grading. He said he paid the person $200 to do it.

As an aside, that list ended up being completely worthless when he sold me the collection because I went through the books myself in person when I got there and made my offer based on what I saw. I took a printed copy of the list after buying because he was insistent and quite proud of it, but it went straight into the dumpster as soon as I got home. 

[THE_BEYONDER]

On 11/3/2022 at 7:55 AM, media_junkie said:

A few years ago I took my personal collection from 60 long boxes down to 20 long boxes.  So I went through and verified, graded, made a database of the 40 boxes that I was selling (with a price I wanted).  I hated it and wanted to light them all on fire after dong 20 of the 40 boxes.  It was a slog and took me quite a few months of working 2 to 3 hours a night after dinner.  I would never do that for someone else.  I am going to agree with Shadroch here, if they are not your own comics you are going to hate this job.

A slog.  That is a great description of such a project.  If you’re out of work, this would be a good project to fill time for a couple months.  As a side project....ugh.

[BuscemasAvengers]

Another factor to consider is auxiliary expenses. How far would you have to travel the days you go to assess the collection? Gas/food reimbursements? Does the owner prefer a particular software be used (e.g. CLZ) and, if so, will there be a fee to set up an account to establish a database?

[marvelmaniac]

Back in 2015 I graded (with notes), cataloged and photographed all 2000 books in my collection (and about 500 from my Son's collection), granted, I only did this in the evening after work for about an hour each night but it took 6 month's to complete.

[MAR1979]

HUGE amount of manual effort. The value of each book is not relevant as the labor on each is the same amount of time.

Seems like a 2-3 person job at $30-$50 per hour.  Not worth it unless Silver Age or older books. Bronze and Copper only if they are overall high grade.
 

For the amount of time it will take one person to do the job correctly I'd walk away from it. Juice simply ain't worth the squeeze.  Again unless books are Silver or older or high grade Bronze.

 

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by MAR1979

[FlyingDonut]

Some points.

1. Anyone who is saying this is an easy job has never done this before. I bought a 40 long box completely unsorted collection in early September 2019. Working at nights and weekends I had it alphabetized and sorted - but not cataloged and graded - in three months. Cataloging and grading 12,000 books the way it was described will be a brutal and time consuming slog. If you can get it to two minutes per book, you can do roughly 200-250 in an eight hour day - so figure 400 person-hours. You're looking at at least three months of drudgery at an FTE level. If you're doing on top of a regular job? A year. If you get multiple people to do it the grading won't be consistent so it will need to be one person doing all the grading. You could have one person trail and catalogue, which would help significantly, but would up the cost.

2. Anyone who is saying $30 per hour or $50 per hour has never done this before. You're paying for expertise and skill. $30 per hour is $62,500 annually. Think of it that way. Someone who knows what they're doing is worth much more than that.

3. If I took this job on? I'd charge a flat $25,000 and the client would get back 12,000 graded, catalogued, sorted, bagged and boarded comics in a year. I'd absolutely kick myself in the nuts every time I went into my workroom to do it.

[speedcake]

What donut said. Just walk way, IMO. 

[paqart]

On 11/1/2022 at 9:24 PM, KCOComics said:

Do you plan to take them out to grade them or just give an approximation based on the cover? 

 

I bought a 5k comic book collection a few years ago and my brother and I had to bag, board, grade and record every issue (using excel).  It's time consuming!  Though having them bagged and boarded is a big plus. 

I would think of it as a labor of love.  I would probably charge them a 1 time of fee of a few hundred bucks (or some nicer comics you might want) and have them throw in pizza and beer.

It won't be a good financial return on your time, but I look at it as one collector helping another. 

OMG. I have spent I don't know how many hundreds of hours doing this with my collection over the past few years, and I only have 5,000 comics. I did put a few months into creating a database that updates pricing and keeps track of cost among other things. Still, although it does almost everything automatically now, it still takes a couple minutes to enter anything into the database. It is easier when I buy a stack for a bulk price, they're all the same title/issue/condition but that doesn't happen often. I agree with the others here, this is a $20k job minimum.

 

[Tec-Tac-Toe]

I will catalog my comic books, outside of a hand written log, ... never.

[ramrodcar]

Agree with lots of the replies so far (stay far away). That being said, if the books were my fancy I'd try and make this a buying opportunity and layer in a lot of the points brought up in this thread as reasons for a given wholesale price.

Regardless, come back and tell us what happens/what you saw!

[Poekaymon]

I have to chime in because I recently did something like this for my own collection, and it was only around 1500 books, and it was some sweaty work, no lie.  My process:

1.  Take book out of whatever slime encrusted, rotten bag it was in.

2.  Take photograph of book.

3.  Assign very quick grade to book based solely on the cover.

4.  Add title, #, "grade," and any notes into an Excel spreadsheet

5.  Put in new bag and board, tape shut.

6.  File book and get new one.

Sounds easy but doing this 1500 times took a long time and was quite draining.  Doing 12,000 is simply something not something I would opt into unless it was a truly magnificent collection and there was no hard deadline.  Based on how long it took me, it'd be a minimum of like a month, working all day every day.  But I wouldn't even consider it unless the timeline was several months at least.     

[MattTheDuck]

I would dearly love to see the look on your client's face if you told him the job was $25,000.  Your time is definitely worth that, it's probably fair and it's "only" $2/book - but it's still a big number.  As others have noted, whether the client thinks it's worth it depends on the total value of the books.  Look forward to hearing what's in there.

[BlowUpTheMoon]

Chuck and Nanette did 18,000 books. 

[darkstar]

2 minutes per book for grading isn't happening if you are going through every page, which may either be necessary or a complete waste of time depending on the age of the books and apparent condition from looking at the covers. 

[Aman619]

On 11/4/2022 at 12:48 AM, paqart said:

OMG. I have spent I don't know how many hundreds of hours doing this with my collection over the past few years, and I only have 5,000 comics. I did put a few months into creating a database that updates pricing and keeps track of cost among other things. Still, although it does almost everything automatically now, it still takes a couple minutes to enter anything into the database. It is easier when I buy a stack for a bulk price, they're all the same title/issue/condition but that doesn't happen often. I agree with the others here, this is a $20k job minimum.

 

Im curious:  you say it updates prices automatically?  do you mean that when you upfdate the condition, or the "pricing data" it recalculates vale?  or does it get new sales data by itself, and update the values of your copies?  THAT would be priceless!

[Aman619]

On 11/4/2022 at 6:24 PM, darkstar said:

2 minutes per book for grading isn't happening if you are going through every page, which may either be necessary or a complete waste of time depending on the age of the books and apparent condition from looking at the covers. 

he doesn't have to replicate a CGC type full on grading effort.  The owner just want to know what he has. And if it happens to be valuable, is HIS copy nice enough.  So many books are worth "the same" in all grades below 9.8... not worth grading and hard to sell.