What NOT To Do When Selling Your Comic Book Collection Online - PT 1
written by Matt 'Chaos' Fuller

Looking to sell your comic book collection online?

Well, that's a given, otherwise you wouldn't be reading a guide about how to do it. Thankfully, we at Fantasy Road are here to help. Fantasy Road is the UK's biggest buyers of comic books, and we're got the shining reputation of being the best there is. Now, to the point.

You've likely found yourself in the position of staring gormlessly into the glow of your pc monitor, after googling to work out when to begin. I get it, it's a hard, time consuming process (unless you sell to us), but unfortunately this guide isn't about the beggining. Fortunately, that guide already exists. This guide, will teach you what not to do. Small and large things that hinder the process, or lose you money as a whole.

Let's start with the obvious one.

Over-estimation

Now, the problem with our industry is that people assume that we're going to offer as low as we can, to make as much moneyt as we can. This is a standard practice in most sales-based businesses, and I can completely understand why people might come to us thinking that to be the case. To put it as bluntly as possible, where we're concerned, you're wrong. Fantasy Road is the UK's largest buyers of comic books, and not only do we have a sparkling reputation for honest  and accurate offers, but we're up front in a highly competative market. As well as this, we're the UK's most followed comic book live sales streamers, so we're not just yoiur standard bricks and mortar store with a reach that only covers one set area. We're country wide, baby. Because of this, we're constantly in the public eye, and evegrything we do is known and measured. plus, we have a huge reach, with over 150,000 comics sold this year alone. This means that we don't need to lowball anyone. We pay the best price possible, to secure the goods. It's as simple as that. 

I'm not actually mentioning this to sing our own praises (on this occasion!) but I do so to explain a repeat situation that we see all the time. 

The sad truth, is that the comic book market is failing, and it has been since lockdown during the Covid outbreak. Because of this, and the speed of the crash, we do frequently get sellers coming to us, with an expectation of prices from back around before the crash, where individual issues were up to 70% more valuable We get it, you're not in the industry, so why would you have a finger on the pricing pulse?

One of the problems here, is that after we give our offer, the seller sometimes declines, then chooses to look elsewhere. Absolutely nothing wrong with that... Until that same seller finds that everywhere else that they approach has offered far less than we have. At this point, that same seller comes back, two maybe three months later. The new issue, is that a market crash doesn't wait for anyone. Three months gone, means three months of further decline, and when the books hit are higher end, higher value, stuff, that's a huge chunk of lost potential profit. For example, last year we were approached by a seller with a small lot. We offered £1.5k. They politely declined with the intent to shop around. They came back last week, and told us that the highest offer that they had recieved since us was £900, and wanted to accept the £1.5k... Only now that nearly a year had passed, that value had dropped to sub £500, due to 80% of the worth being tied to a single book, which at the time was booming because of speculative value, tying it to an upcoming TV show. A TV show that subsequently bombed, and the book lost most of its value. They still sold the collection to us, but there were (understandably) none too happy!

The other way that this tends to go, is as follows.

Dead lots / picked collections

A dead lot, is what we call a comic book collection that has been picked clean of all value. Continuing on from above, another outcome of our potential seller declining our offer, is because they have decided that they can get more for their money by selling the comic books privately. This is absolutely correct, but there are caveats. If you choose to sell your comic book collection, the first thing that will go is the value. People that know what they're looking for, will swoop in and pluck that baby clean. If you choose the route of a car bootsale, you'll them picking through the boxes, selectively taking anything worth more than a quid, or on ebay, you'll find that only your listings where you've accidentally underpriced a book of value, will move. Fun fact, 60 - 80% of every collection that we purchase, never sells. We make regular charity donations to children's wards, and charity shops, with the bulk that piles up. 

Sure, we have a price per issue basis on bulk, but what people don't realise is that the price per issue basis works as a value average. We have to factor in the fact that most of the books that we purchase will never sell, and aim to claw back the money, plus hopefully some small profit, from the 20 - 40% that does. That means, that if you go and sell everything worth anything from your lot, then come back to us to dump the stuff that you can't get rid of, we, same as every other comic book store, won't be able to take it!

This means that often, sellers actually make more money by taking the reseller offer, than they do by selling selectively in private, plus, our offers mean that when you sell us your comic book collection, we take care of everything else from that point onward. We even send the courier with a sticky label, if we can't collect in person.

Organisation

This is one that blows my mind, quite frequently. Some people come to us with a one liner, such as - got comics, want to sell. Okay great, so what are these comics? To save a few days of confused replies, please include the details required in the form. An important factor to note, is that unless you're looking for a flat rate price for a blind bulk sale, you will need at the bare miniumum a list that includes the title, issue number, and (importantly) the publication year. The reason for this, is that the publishers have reused the same titles (constantly) over the years, so 'Amazing Spiderman' could have any one of thirty different titles. I'm always surprised at the people that come to us with a few hundred books, then when asked for what the contents are, they just reply either 'comic books' or 'dunno too many to go through really isn't there?'. Strangely, it's always the small collections that people tend to not want to sort out a list, and more often than not they're the ones asking for prices that we wouldn't be able to meet unless every single issue in their thirty book lot is an amazing spiderman #300. Put it this way, if you were buying a car,  how would you feel if you went into the garage and the salesman said he'd sell you one but you wouldn't be able to see wha tit was until you'd already paid for it? Insanity, right? Especially seen as the asking price is often more than what a car is worth!

Secondly, on the same subject, literal organisation of the comic book lot is something that will absolutely net you more money from us. For example, one of the recent comic book lots that we purchased a few weeks back, was over 40 longboxes of comics from the 60s onwards. In these pristine white blocks of beauty, the comic books were ordered, bagged and boarded, and seperated with labelled dividers. This, is an extreme case, with an incredible amount of care taken. All the time, I bumped our offer by 25%, due to the sheer amount of time that the organsisation would shave off from he having to go through the lot to log it into stock.

This works both ways too. If your lot has just been chucked in boxes, with runs broken over multiple shortboxes, all spread about with no order? You have to remember that sorting these lots into runs, or creating any form of organisation, takes a LOT of time, and time  is money. If the lot is a jumble, the offer will reflect that, as we have to invest more time into sorting it out.