Mashed Potatoes-migration

This is my last last post. Instead of continuing the debate with counter points, it is a good place to end my side now since everybody, including myself is firmly entrenched in their position. I just want to thank you all for being respectful during this thread as I have a wildly unpopular view and position that runs contrary to those on the boards. I am part of an group of speculators/flippers that communicate daily through our own private yahoo chat board. Many of the members are seasoned vets that have been doing this since the 90s (in comic books and other collectibles). One guy was talking about his investments in Pet Rocks, so some go back to the 70s. Math cannot dispute that they / we are making a good chunk of coin and not really spending all that much time doing so, which runs counter to a lot of the posts here claiming that flippers are minimum wage walking zombies. Anyways, I was warned not to come on these boards by the group to offer a contrarian view of our profit/work load reality. You have my sincere gratitude for keeping the conversation civil. I wish you all the best.

Yeah... 1. Flippers make more than minimum wage doing what they do. The notion of the unwitting flipper that is working for minimum wage is a fallacy perpetrated on the boards by people who don't like the fact that flippers look at comics as commodities and their volume sales model drive down average sale price per comic. 2. Bubble burst is in the offing, probably in a year. Smart, conservative move is to sell a portion of your comics to cover cost in case it bursts sooner. Then let the remaining copies sit till you heart is content or the right price comes along. Either way, since you cover costs, you won't be left at a loss. 3. I need to stop posting. This is my last post. This is taking too much time today and I am compulsive about stuff. So I will stfu. Going back with all of the other speculator/flippers to lurker mode. Said my peace. Now out. Will continue to scan the boards for a juicy post that leads to a hidden gem. Just like the Helheim one yesterday on Oni Press online sales of the variants. Thanks to that poster I grabbed both variants. So did my girlfriend. So did her sister. So did my Mom.

I don't disagree with the overall notion that a buy and hold strategy, rather than a quick flip is a preferable model (especially for the industry). But I think that everybody is over exaggerating the labor intensive story of selling comic books, which leads to this unreal notion that it equates to minimum wage. It does not take four hours to buy and sell 5 books. I am sorry, but it doesn't unless you are in a slow-mo universe. There are economies of scale in place with large shipment orders and ways to work smarter, not harder. I know the poster above readily admits that efficiencies can be gained in his example, but his/her example is not indicative of how the people I know run through the comic book buy/sell/ship process. The example above is the exception and not the rule. Let's break down the four hour example used above to sell 5 comic books with how much time it actually took me to unload 80 books in a week. I bought 250 EOW #1 and 50 EOW FP #1. I sold 60 of EOW #1 and 20 of the EOW FP #1, to roughly cover costs of purchasing all 300 books ($2 and change per regular book and $7 for FP). The rest are going to sit in my closet or at CGC till at least issue #6. 1. Buying the books (6 minutes) - It took all of two minutes at DCB, TFAW and FP to order my books online. Why go to a comic store when you can buy it cheaper online, and they deliver to your door? There is no drive involved....nothing. Buying books is as simple as going to the web site, clicking add to cart for your book, adjusting the quantity, and then checking out. This is not labor intensive. Searching for a good YouTube video is more labor intensive. 2. Buying packing supplies online through Amazon Prime (4 minutes) - Again, buy online as it is cheaper, shipping is free and there is no drive time involved. This is not labor intensive. 3. Receiving books - They come bag and boarded. There is nothing to do outside of moving them to your comic book boxes. This is not labor intensive. It takes a few minutes. Again, less labor intensive than googling a new meme. 4. Packaging - This is the most labor intensive aspect of the process, but there are ways around it. I invited my friend over who has a 11 year old kid. The little guy likes to help out. So he packaged the books while I hung out with his Mom. Aiden inspects the books for me, can spot NM books, and is careful to package them for me. There has never been one complaint of his packaging and shipping. If children this age in other modern day countries or during the industrial revolution can perform complex duties in factories, modern day American kids can surely package a comic book. Not rocket science here. He worked for a little bit over an hour (call it 90 minutes) to package 60 books in lots of 5 or 10. Actual time it took me = 0 minutes. Actual cost = a medium cookie dough milk shake from Baskin Robbins. 5. Listing on eBay (20 minutes) - Creating the first eBay listing takes 20 minutes, less so if you have a template already. Since you are selling the same product over and over again, each additional listing takes less than 5 seconds to click "list similar item". This is not labor intensive. I also have a list of people I sell to outside of eBay that I send out one bulk email to. Some of my biggest sales actually don't happen on eBay but through my email list. 6. Answering questions (1-2 minutes a question) - If you auction description is detailed enough, you don't get that many questions. The main question I got was, "do you have any more EOW?" or "can you hold 10 till Friday when I get my paycheck?". It is not labor intensive to read one sentence and respond back, "Yes, I have more books and can hold them for you. Have a nice day." 7. Shipping (2 minute) - Also not labor intensive. Because all the boxes I have are uniform, and already packed; I know the shipping weight. So shipping is comprised of clicking on print shipping label in eBay or PayPal, selecting the service type and weight, then sticking the label on the prepacked box, and then clicking on another button to schedule a mail pickup. I don't go to the post office or ups or fedex when they offer to come to you. You don't even need to input the tracking number to communicate to the seller because eBay and Paypal do that for you automatically. So I don't get this minimum wage stuff that people keep on throwing out there. I have honestly spent more time reading and writing on the EOW thread today alone than I have spent selling and shipping books this week. I have spent maybe 2 hours on the entire EOW buying, selling, shipping process for selling 80 books, 60 of which are already out the door. So that is around $1000 in comics in under two hours of actual work (reading the boards and bleeding cool not included in this analysis). If you take out the ebay/paypal fees, along with the initial cost of the 80 books and include the milkshake fees, the profit is $600 for about two hours of actual work. That is $300 an hour for this example. How is that minimum wage? Let's say that I did not use child labor and packaged them myself and spent an exaggerated additional four hours doing so, that still comes out to $100 an hour. I agree that you can fatten up your margins if your wait longer and take a chance that a book appreciates. But most volume investors are going to cover their initial costs first and flip off the bat. The investment philosophy you guys are saying is true if a book appreciates, but some of these comments of how little instant flippers make per hour is far far far far from true. Let's not kid ourselves here while defaming flippers. You can dislike them for damaging the comic industry, or driving down the price of a book since they have a volume profit model, or the fact that they put profit over the content of a book, but let's not think that they a foolish enough to work for minimum wage. The only flippers making minimum wage are the ones that do all four of these things; drive 30 miles to comic stores, wait in hour long lines at the post office to ship, sell/package books one by one, and sell books for $0.50 above their purchase price. I can't say for sure, but I don't think there are any that check all of these boxes. I know a few flippers (not Viperdays). None of them operate this way. They are all savvy business people that have well paying jobs and broad investment portfolios. There are too many opportunity costs and the concept of comparative advantage keeps them from working for minimum wage. Comic books are just another investment item for them and they would not do it for minimum wage. As to what is healthier for the industry, you are right that wide-spread speculation and a flooding of non-traditional collectors distorting the natural supply demand equilibrium is going to pop this bubble. This is no different than investing in tulips in 17th century Holland, or purchasing debt in the South Seas company, or investing in the pre1929 US stock market on margin. All of these were bubbles that were driven with speculation. And like these bubbles, there will be a correction, but who knows when. Some speculators will lose money at the end, some will have costs covered at a minimum. The speculators that won't get caught in a bubble burst are the ones that immediately cover costs. I have covered all costs on my comics. So if I don't sell another comic and they all get reduced to $0 value, I still won't lose anything and would have made a profit...above minimum wage. Enough above minimum wage that Saga paid for the new double paned windows in my house. NWM is going to pay for the new bar I am installing. I still have over 200 EOW, 50 Sex, 50 Helheim, 3 SAGA RRP 9.8, 2 Comics Pro ToT 9.8, and 6 Saga #1 getting graded at CGC. So I am hoping that this still market keeps up a little longer.

CBT, I am not a Viperdays historian, so if he missed out on Saga, PP, Revival and just got the clunkers, he is not doing as well as I thought. He is still making money, just smaller margins than I thought. Either way, I think we both agree that knowing your product, being more selective in comics is preferable for us and would improve margins for him. I still don't think the Diamond strategy works for cost savings because having a business license subjects you to more taxes (Franchise Tax Boards/Business License Taxes/etc.) than you would pay as an unincorprated individual claiming the additional comic book income. And you still need a storefront or an ecommerce web site (they won't take an ebay storefront). The cost of the web site or renting retail space kills the whole Diamond strategy unless you become Larry or Midtown. But I think most of the people here have other day jobs that prevent this. Plus the cost of incorporating and resubmissions of annual charters, etc. You either pay an accountant for that, which kills your profit, or you spend a grip of time doing it which lowers your efficiency metrics on the return on your time. Either way, we disagree on the Diamond strategy, but I agree with you on the rest of your statements. On a side note, I saw that you invested in the Brian Wood Star Wars book. I am intrigued by the Anakin Starkiller book that Dark Horse just announced at Wondercon. Did you see it? It is a comic based on Lucas' first draft of Star Wars, which was vastly different than the movie.

I agree that one should be more selective in purchasing comics as investments, picking comics one by one like a sniper rather than taking a tommy gun to the new releases and spraying them all. I don't buy more than six comics a year for investments. I buy a ton for my own reading enjoyment, but only six in bulk for investment. My six for this year are/were Helheim, Sex, East of West, Lazarus, Pretty Deadly and Sex Criminals. Viperdays could better maximize profits by being more selective, but he is making coin doing what he does. The main thing with Viper is that he is not buying his preorders at cover, he is buying at 50 percent off, so he still breaks even when he sells below cover, or even makes a very thin profit margin. What makes him "grands" is when he buys a #1 for 1.50 and sells it for 10, 20, 30....80 dollars if he held inventory long enough. What Viperdays has done over the last year has worked so far. The math proves it out. If he bought 5 different comic books that bombed at 250 copies each from DCB preorders at 50 percent off (1.50 each), that means that he spent 1,875 dollars. One investment at 250 copies of Saga or NWM or East of West covers this entire loss and makes him money. Dumping all copies of a good investment comic at 10 dollars gets him 2500 versus the expense of 1,875 on his 5 clunkers and 375 for buying the good investment comic. But he is not losing all of his investment on the 5 books that bombed. If he sold them for one dollar each, his loss is 875, versus the money he made on SAGA and other 1s that hit...Revival, NWM, PP, EOW. He is not making minimum wage. Based on his volume and how smart he was to not dump all the books immediately, he could have easily made more than 20k last year by just packing comic books 10 or 5 at a time. If he averaged 20 for SAga or PP, that's 5k. If he averaged 40 dollars on 250 copies, that is 10k. I agree with CBT that this is a bubble that will pop. People flood in when there is easy money. I don't agree with the Diamond comment. I don't think that the savings from the Diamond discounts outweigh the additional expense. To have a Diamond account, you need to have a business license, which requires you to incorporate (s corp, sub s, LLC, LP, etc.). This subjects you to certain city, state and federal taxes on income that I doubt most comic sellers at shows, eBay, etc are reporting. In addition, states like CA have minimum franchise taxes regardless if you make a profit or not. In CA, you have to pay 800 in Q1 of every year. On top of this, reporting and filing for a corp is a pain in the . If you have to spend time doing all the proper accounting and filings for the corp, and spend time shipping books, then he will truly be making minimum wage. One last thing, I believe that Diamond requires that you have a fully functioning eCommerce web site for orders if you don't have a retail storefront, and won't allow you to buy from them if you are just an eBayer. So the cost of a eCommerce site further kills the margins.

I saw a few of his items and based on the price he made some coin on them. buying 100 of every Image 1st means you get the winners, and all the losers too. Very true. I think that Viperdays has probably bought some clunkers (I know that I have with Clone, Black Acre and Punk Rock Jesus - I know it was a mini, but I thought it was that good). However just one of the successes (Saga, NWM, East of West) more than covers all of the cash spent on the clunkers, especially if he is buying 50 percent off a DCB or 35 percent off at TFAW.

I don't think most of the people buying this comic are aware of the est. print run that both Hickman and Dragotta alluded to in interviews. I have been selling on eBay and people are asking how much more I have in inventory for them to purchase. They are worried that I am going to run out and pleading for me to hold books for them till their next paycheck. With my last auction today, I covered my initial investment cost. Going to hold for a bit to see if this thing can get into the high teens or low 20s by issue 6. Also shipping a bunch off to CGC.

Midtown is terrible. I have had good results frond dcb, tfaw and dreamland.

We sold out with in a few hours about 20 books and we are a smaller store. It sold out at both my LCSs on the first day.

I hope Larry is right. If he is, people posting or reading this Board probably account for 50 percent of the population. I have 5 percent if the total print is 1k.

Just got my email to! Well, I like the sound of that. I was wondering where my FP order stood. Did you get any confirmation from them after you OK'd the shipping charge, or is this the first you've heard back since then? Just got my email to! Well, I like the sound of that. I was wondering where my FP order stood. Did you get any confirmation from them after you OK'd the shipping charge, or is this the first you've heard back since then? Just got my email to! Well, I like the sound of that. I was wondering where my FP order stood. Did you get any confirmation from them after you OK'd the shipping charge, or is this the first you've heard back since then? I got an automatic generated email telling me that my ordered shipped and somebody from their mail order team also emailed me today to confirm.

I'm so close to being done. It's a great series! Right up there with TWD & 100 Bullets for me. I almost don't want to finish it because once it's done its done. It's begging to be developed into a movie. The movie is already in development. But instead of the original planned trilogy, the current -script is for one movie for the entire story. I think Y would be better as a tv series.

I checked two LCS last night. They both sold out of East of West. Looks like Midtown and Dreamland Comics have some left but are 1 per. TFAW is sold out.

Somebody in Chicago said that their FP variant has shipped. But I think the vast majority of people have not had their items shipped. It shows as processing for mine. I confirmed shipping costs on Wed and followed up on Thursday. Got a auto response that they are gone till Tuesday. That is a pretty nice holiday break.

Oh, here is the link to the JL ordering structure. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/03/28/so-how-did-jupiters-legacy-get-those-150000-pre-orders-anyway/