You may make money from your own comic book collection. However, it’s never as easy as you think comicvine. Too many casual comic collectors have charged gung ho into purchasing comics without thinking about the risks involved. From my experience, here will be the 10 brutal truths you need to find out if your goal would be to earn money by purchasing your comic collection.
1. If you want to earn money from your own comics, you first have to find a buyer. Comics aren’t currency. You can’t spend or eat a comic. A certain comic may be worth only what someone is willing to fund it, not that which you think or what the purchase price guide says.
2. For some comic books, it could take months as well as years to find a buyer who will provide you with the purchase price you want. Obviously, you don’t want to tie cash you to live on to buy comic books.
3. You have to take care of your comics to be able to earn money from them. Collectible comics require careful handling and careful storage. That $500 Batman comic you’ve can be worthless if damaged by heat, humidity, pests, or your personal carelessness.
4. Ensure you are buying the actual thing. Unscrupulous comic dealers of all kinds have rooked the huge demand for comic collectibles to hawk their particular illegal fakes and cleverly restored items.
5. If no one wants it, the comic book is valueless. Demand is much more important than supply in determining price increases and decreases. Of course, high demand or low supply books is likely to make prices increase a lot more rapidly.
6. Comic prices and demand are tied to the whims of collectors. No-one has a crystal ball to predict how the tastes of comic collectors may change. Whenever a new movie arrives (X-Men, Spidey, Iron Man for example) prices can skyrocket for key issues of that comic character, but in some instances the prices can drop just as fast following the movie ages.
7. Although prices for comics generally have risen steadily, individual items can still decrease in value from year and year. Know the real history of one’s particular comic before your buy it to resell. Don’t assume that every item will accompany the typical trend of increases for comics.
8. Show patience when buying old comics. If you buy an comic for $100 from the dealer. Invest the the same book in the very overnight, he’ll give you just $50 for it. You’re going to have to hold back before book may be worth at the least $200 retail before you can sell it for $l00 wholesale and recoup your initial investment.
9. Be realistic when buying new comics. Today’s comics are published in enormous quantities. An average issue of The Amazing Spider Man can have a print run between 300,000 and 500,000 copies. With that lots of copies of a problem available available on the market, for most of these comics, you’ll have to hold back quite a long time before the purchase price increases…if ever.
10. Watch the hype. Comic book stores often stockpile crates of ‘collectible’ issues in their store rooms, flooding the marketplace with their overstock the 2nd that the book rises in value. X-Men #1, the very first issue of a fresh X-Men spin-off series published in the late 80’s, had a print run of 5,000,000 copies. Today, despite speculator hopes, that same X-Men #1 book is frequently sold for less than its cover price.