commence floggery

My main goal this last weekend was to get some stuff on e-bay.

I have a box that I keep next to my bed and as I finish reading or watching something I dump it in the box. When the box is overflowing with stuff is usually my cue (I had a real thicko moment there where I couldn't remember how to spell cue!) to get some stuff flogged.

The thing about this pile though is that it can be a little deceptive. Although it often gets the point of overflowing, sometimes there's not actually much in it that I can actually sell.

The reason is that often the majority of the pile is made up of manga volumes and while I will eventually sell them, I've learned that manga sells best when you sell it as a complete collection. That's particularly true at the moment where I've got a lot of ongoing series that I'm collected, but that aren't really keepers.

I mean, they're not bad, but equally they're not ones I want to hang onto in the long term. That means I have to put them away in boxes until the series is complete and I can sell them all in one go.

The other thing that does work is if I dump a series and I'm up to date. They usually sell quite well if it's a case of "all released so far" as you're effectively kick-starting someone else collecting them. The thing that doesn't sell at all well is single volumes in the middle of a series.

The problem, I guess, is that you're relying on several people being on that same volume in order to get multiple bids and also that they'll be looking on e-bay for that specific volume. It's usually fairly unlikely.

But what that does mean is you can't sell, say, volumes 1-10 in a lot and then try and sell the individual volumes as you read them. I've tied something similar to that before and I just cannot sell them at anything like a reasonable price. Where I would at minimum get a third back from selling multiple volumes or a complete series, with individual volumes I'm lucky to be getting 5% back.

When you consider postage and e-bay fees, that means it's almost guaranteed to be a loss-maker. And while I don't mind selling stuff and not making a lot of money so that other people can enjoy the series, I'm not happy about loosing money for the privilege.

Anyway, the upshot of going through the pile was that I've ended up with about a dozen things on e-bay. The pile had a lot more stuff in it that I've boxed away for the time being, but a dozen things isn't bad all things considered.

Hopefully I'll have more stuff to get rid of soon as well, because for the first time in ages I sat down and marathoned a load of episodes on DVD on Sunday. And that was on top of playing a load of Anno 1404: Venice, so a fairly successful weekend.