This is an expansion to an earlier post I made back in May of this year titled "Flipping Books for Better Books and Profits" which explained how through out the year I will purchase books not only for my personal collection but some I will pick up for the sole purpose of flipping them for profit (most of the time any way as some books I strike out on).

Most of the books I flip are either lower grade duplicates from my collection as a result of upgrading or books I find below market value that I have no desire to collect, but i feel the market is willing to pay a fair amount for. Sometimes these additional funds will go right back into more comics and sometimes just right into my bank account. This is an important and exciting part of the hobby for me as not only do I get the thrill of the hunt for the books themselves, but watching my books in auctions is pretty exciting too. I keep a spreadsheet and track my performance and currently I average an overall gross profit percentage of about 53%(example: you buy a book for $100 and flip it for $150 = gross profit of $50 or 50%). So far this year I have spent about $950 on books to flip and sold them for about $2,016. I don't have the funds or time time to make a living doing this, but it is another way for me to enjoy comic collecting and it helps me justify some of my larger purchases to my wife. Which is great as I just purchased 2 silver age books for $767 total that are currently in transit to me (so no pictures yet) and have been on my want list for a while (Sub-Mariner #1 CGC 9.4 white pages and Iron Man and Sub-Mariner #1 CGC 9.4 off-white to white pages).

I normally send 2-3 batches of books to auction a year. The batch I sent in May had 31 books (check my old journal for those results) and my second auction of the year that just recently ended had only 2 books in it. This is usually the slow time for me as far as convention visits go (my convention season starts with wizard world Austin in November and ends with the Dallas Comicon in May) and I kind of slacked off on my online hunting for the past few months as well. However, this was a huge auction for me as far as return of investment goes. I spent $162 total on these 2 books and sold them for a combined $537.50!!! This is nearly double my initial estimate of $285. The two books sold were Ultimate Spider-Man #1 CGC 9.2 Universal and Ultimate Spider-Man #104 1:100 white variant PGX 10.0 Platinum Mint. Guess which one brought in the big bids!

I hope you all are having a successful and fun collecting year as well!

Happy hunting (and flipping for some of you)!

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