Sooner or later every collector plays both sides of the counter: hunting books to buy or figuring out what to do with all the books you've outgrown. Both sides reward knowing how they actually work. Below is an overview of buying and selling comics, including the fees that most folks don't talk about.
Buying: where and how
Your local shop (hello). Strengths: you inspect condition in person, there's no shipping risk, and questions get answered by someone who deals with comics daily. Back issue bins might contain some gems from your favorite author/writer/series, and everything from this week's new books to graphic novels are on the shelf to flip through before you pay.
Conventions. The deepest one-room selection you'll ever browse. Haggling on price is pretty normal; see the con guide for the etiquette. Bring your wish list and rough values so that you know exactly what to look for and about how much you'd like to pay. Typically, booths will also be running some sort of special or discount on their back issues. However, be wary of convention mark-ups.
Online marketplaces (eBay, Whatnot, dealer sites). Unbeatable selection; the trade-off is buying condition from photographs. To protect yourself, make sure you study all the listing's photos (ask for more if it's a high dollar book, spine and back cover especially), read the description for the words "restored," "married" (pages from another copy), or "reading copy". Also check seller feedback on comic sales specifically, and remember raw grades in listings are optimistic opinions: an ungraded "NM" from a stranger is a VF until proven otherwise. For expensive books, graded copies exist precisely to remove this argument; know that eBay's authenticity programs currently cover trading cards, not comics, so a slab's certification is your real assurance (verify the cert number on the grader's site).
The price-check habit: before spending real money on a collectible, check recent sold prices, not asking prices, on eBay's sold listings or a tracker like GoCollect. Asking prices are just that, asks. If a product is new, MSRP is the standard but can be marked up based on market conditions.
Selling: realistic expectations
The single most important thing to know: price-guide value is not what you get paid. Every route to cash has a cost (fees, shipping, risk, or a dealer's margin), and a collection's value is concentrated in its few best books. Most of a typical long box is reading copies worth a few dollars each. That's just the nature of comics. With those expectations set, here are the routes:
Route 1: eBay
The biggest buyer pool and generally the strongest prices. The current cost, per eBay's published fees for comics: a 13.25% final value fee on the total sale (including shipping you charge) for casual sellers, plus $0.30–0.40 per order. Store subscribers ($27.95/month Basic and up) pay a reduced 12.35% in the comics category. On a $100 sale, figure roughly $13–15 to eBay before shipping costs. You do all the work: photos, listing, packing, shipping, and customer service. This route is worth it for individual books or "packs/lots" with good value. It can be a fruitless grind for low value books.
Route 2: Whatnot and live selling
Livestream auction selling is increasingly where modern slabs and hot books move. Whatnot's published rate is an 8% commission plus 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing. Note the processing fee applies to the total including shipping and tax, which surprises people. Fast-moving and fun if you enjoy performing but you'll need to build an audience for good results. It also skews toward volume sellers.
Route 3: Consignment and auction houses (for the good stuff)
For genuinely valuable books, consignment services sell on your behalf: MyComicShop's published rates run 8% on auctions (8–10% fixed price), and major auction houses like Heritage charge the buyer a premium (commonly cited around 20%) which effectively comes out of the price. You surrender a cut and some time in exchange for their buyer pool and credibility. A facilitator like this is usually the right call for four-figure and up books.
Route 4: Sell or trade to a shop (minimum effort, honest discount)
The internet says shops won't tell you this, so we will: when a shop buys your comics, it offers a percentage of realistic resale value, commonly somewhere in the 20–40% range depending on the material, and higher when you take store credit instead of cash (credit is the best percentage deal in the building, and traders know it). Why not 100%? Because the shop then does everything above (grading judgment, inventory risk, fees, the wait) and keeps the lights on. What you're buying with that discount: instant, zero-effort, whole-collection liquidation, including the boxes nobody online wants. It's a fair trade for many collections, and you can work with your shop on price as most shops want great community relationships.
Your playbook:
- Sort first. Catalogue what you have (how), identify the handful of books with real value, and check sold prices on those.
- Split the strategy. Sell your best books individually, graded if the math works (grading guide), via eBay, Whatnot, or consignment. If you don't want to deal with the headache of selling individual books, put them in their own section when you visit a shop so that they know those issues are your "keys", along with the rest of your collection.
- Factor your time. Fifty hours of listing $4 books to beat a shop's bulk offer by $60 is a poor use of your time. Fees are visible; time and energy are the fees people always underestimate.
Where we fit: we buy and trade collections. Get in touch or bring your books (or your catalogue) into the shop and we'll make an honest offer, and tell you straight if a book deserves a bigger stage than our bins. We also sell online ourselves at our eBay store. Restock your own bins from back issues and new comics, or just walk in and ask us.
