Selling some comics on eBay

I haven’t sold anything on eBay in a long time. The last time, I think, was in 2008, when I sold some video games. So that’s a little more than ten years.

I just recently put together a pile of about two dozen trade paperback and hardcover graphic novels that I want to get rid of. I’d gotten to the point where my accumulation of completed graphic novels was getting a bit out of hand, and I really needed to clear up some space.

I initially thought about giving them away to charity, but I thought they were probably worth too much to just dump them on Goodwill, and I couldn’t find a comics-specific charity that I thought could make good use of them. Then, I thought about selling them all at once to a dealer, but I didn’t think I’d get much money out of that, or even get that much interest from anyone.

So I, somewhat reluctantly, decided to go with eBay. Since it had been so long since I’d sold anything there, I had to figure out how things work nowadays. There used to be a couple of freeware or shareware programs you could use to easily set up a bunch of listings and upload them all at once to eBay, but it doesn’t seem like any of those are around anymore. There are some web-based services that help large sellers manage their inventory and auctions, but they’re not really for guys like me who are just posting a handful of items, and not making a living running an eBay store.

I initially tried to set up the listings using eBay’s mobile app. The app lets you scan UPC codes, then tries to find a matching item, and sets up a listing for that item that you can customize. For me, I think that was a waste of time. It only found about half of my books. I went ahead and saved those as drafts, intending to clean them up on my desktop PC and post them. But I found that they were mostly miscategorized and fairly useless. By the time I was done cleaning them up, I would have been better off starting from scratch.

Well, anyway, I was working on these listings on and off all day, and I’m finally done. I have two dozen books up on eBay now. You can find them all on my eBay user page. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of interest I get. Listings are free now (up to 50 a month), so it doesn’t cost me anything if nothing sells.

I also have some more manga volumes I want to get rid of. I might dig those out and list them tomorrow, if I have time. After that, if things seem to be going well, I’d like to get rid of some individual comic books, probably by selling them in sets.

It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t go to Garden State Comic Fest last month, and that I’m not going to San Diego Comic Con this year. At either show, I probably would have brought home a bunch of new comics and books that I don’t have time to read, nor space to store! (Oh, and, holy cow, SDCC starts next week! I didn’t realize it was so soon!)