Hoody hoo!!

[dreamshark]

When I was out of work back in 2003 I decided to try living off of Richard's comic collection (yes, I had permission). I bagged, boarded, and inventoried; hauled boxes of comics around town to various comic shops; put together a website; and sold a few comics on Ebay. On the whole, it turned out to be more of a hobby than a business. It took a lot of time, and required a non-trivial investment, what with buying all those boxes, bags and boards (not to mention the Overstreet grading and pricing books). I eventually took in more money than I paid out, but not by a really large amount. Didn't even cut down on the volume of space consumed by comics, since they take up significantly more room with the bags and boards. But it was kind of fun, and I learned a lot about grading comics. More of the collection is bagged and boarded, although nowhere near all of it (I estimate the total comics population of the house at more than 10,000). Then I got a job and lost interest in the comics business.

But the comics site is still out there. and occasionally somebody stumbles on it and buys a few comics. That happened a couple of weeks ago, and in a burst of nostalgia I started surfing around on Ebay, looking to see what was hot in the old comics market. To my surprise, Sgt. Fury seemed to be moving well, esp. the early issues. Of all the venues I had tried for selling comics, Ebay had turned out to be by far the least successful. It takes a surprising amount of time, many listings never get a bid, and when they do sell the fees gobble up a noticeable percentage of the profit. But .... for old time's sake I listed 3 old Furies. For the first 4 or 5 days I compulsively checked My Ebay, finding a resounding ZERO in the sold column each time. So I more or less forgot about them, figuring I was out the $5 for the listing cost, bad idea. Checked again on Wednesday, the Last Day of the auction. Hoody hoo!! All of them sold! For a total of about $100, before expenses!

Whee! What fun! Maybe I'll just list a few more!

Comments

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

*nods* Sometimes it works like that...you get a bunch of people sitting around watching an item, and then in the last hours there's this furious scrum of bidding. Go figure.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Positively brilliant!

K.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've found that to be more and more the pattern--no one bids till the very end. There are programs available that do it for people, and I think a lot of folks set it up to bid their maximum about 2 seconds before the ending time, in hopes that everyone else will have waited, too. I've been listing things for a variety of 7, 5, and 3 days, and in every case it's the last 5 minutes that count. And listing for longer periods should give more people a chance to see it; indeed, with longer listing times more people seem to "watch" the item, but it doesn't seem to make for higher final bids.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yay! It sounds like you timed it to catch the right audience.