Thursday, August 28, 2008

It's Dragon*Con Time, Baby!

Very short post to let you know that Walkin' Willie's Comix will be at the 2008 Dragon*Con in Atlanta Georgia - which starts on Friday, August 29, 2008 and ends on Monday, September 1, 2008 (Labor Day).

This mega con covers 3 gigantic hotels and gets more than 40,000 visitors each year. I truly believe that every mortal soul should go to Dragon*Con at least one time in their life. There is art, film, music, comics, movies, contests, panels - well, 32 programming tracks in all (maybe more). Absolutely the best media convention in the world!

Walkin' Willie's Comix is bringing over 50 boxes of trade paperbacks and graphic novels - something for everyone!

C'mon down - it's one helluva party!

Thursday, August 21, 2008

You Just Never Know......

Awhile back I discussed eCrater in a somewhat recent blog article and thought I would share an experience that absolutely floored me!

We recently received an order on eCrater for three bargain bin books - each going for 50 cents apiece. In other words, a small order. Now we would hope and strive to treat each order as if it totaled a grand or better so our main focus was to ship the order promptly making sure that the books were packed properly to avoid damage. OK, we got that done and case closed, right?

Well, as Lee Corso says on ESPN's College Gameday, "Not so fast, my friend"....

I happened to check my Google Analytics to see what kind of traffic my blog and my eCrater store were getting and noticed that one of the referrals was from a website called Auction Insights. As I had not heard of the site, I wanted to check it out to see how someone would get from their site to my site. I figured there would be a list of links somewhere or something like that - no biggie.

Well, I just about passed out when I got there because there was a three-part review of eCrater with the second part dealing with eCrater from the buyer's perspective. The reason that I was reaching for the smelling salts is that the buyer's perspective review was done using the small order from my eCrater website described above. It had screen shots from my site and everything! While the article is still on the homepage as of the date of this article, it will eventually go into archive mode so here is a direct link to the article.

WOW! You just can't buy - at least not cheaply - this type of internet marketing. And to think that it came from a small order, one that I really hadn't thought about after it was shipped. Not only that but the article on Auction Insights caused me to look at the rest of their articles - some really helpful stuff on there for those of you in the online selling biz, particularly if you are using eBay or some other web based store.

While I felt that I had already learned the lesson of treating every single order as if it was the most important one, this experience just reaffirmed that lesson to me.

Why? Because you just never know.....

Monday, August 11, 2008

Marvel Masterworks Variant Editions

Over the next few weeks, we will be auctioning Marvel Masterworks early first print variant editions. The first lot which is on eBay right now has Marvel Masterworks #4 through #8.

When Marvel started these variants they didn't let us know how many would be printed like they did in later editions. Originally, these variants would be knockoffs of the original editions but soon, they started changing the colors of the dust jackets and such.

There is no doubt that the original Masterworks published in 1992 & 1993 are probably the most valuable but these early variants clearly have the lowest print runs and are hard to find, especially in the shrink wrap. While we do not have exact figures for all editions, the print run for these early variants was about 350 to 620 - i.e. not a whole lot of them to go around.

Here are a couple of good resources to check out:

Marvel Masterworks Library - A great resource which lists almost all the editions for each Marvel Masterwork - a few holes that need to be filled but a great resource.

Marvel Masterworks - Wikipedia - another great resource, especially for newbies.

We have about 15 more early edition first print variants to go up on eBay so bid early and often!
Google