SALES TO ASTONISH #19 - MARCH 2024

For the regular readers of this column, an apology. It’s late this month as Easter and other family commitments got in the way. But here we are and I’m delighted to say that March 24 was by far the best month I have had during the four years of running The Unreality Store both with online sales and a long overdue return to doing some comic conventions and other events

The highlight of March was the sale of a number of Marvel monster related comics. Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein’s Monster and even Golden Age horror reprint books such as Tomb of Darkness and Where Monsters Dwell all sold well this month. The exception to this was the two biggies - TOD #1 and WWBN #32 but I’ll come on to those later.

I had some time mid-March on a Monday to list some Bronze Age X-Men from #67 onwards. This was a departure from the regular Thursday and Saturday launches as I am trying ways to get visitors to the website on days where sales are slow.

I put up a post on Instagram and Twitter and they sold almost immediately. I genuinely didn’t think there was much call for these issues as they are all reprints until the introduction of the new X-Men team in Giant Size #1 and #94, but they have new covers and remain a far cheaper way of acquiring the original stories in comic format that the actual issues they reprint.

The notion of getting people on to the site as often as possible ties in with a conundrum that I am facing on how to showcase stock that was introduced over the last 12 months that could only be found by using the search facility. By this I mean that someone is specifically looking for an item rather than casually browsing. I tend to be very forward focused and look at dropping between 100-200 back issues in store each week. A proportion of these sell straight away but the remainder seemingly disappear into the abyss (although each of the historic Thursday launch collections can be found in the Back Issue Bonanza Page on the website https://theunrealitystore.co.uk/pages/back-issue-comic-bonanza) so my challenge is to try to drive some value out of these forgotten issues.

Equally I am conscious that there are areas of the store that are regularly updated and others don’t really see much activity from month to month. For example adding to my book or magazine selections will most probably be passed over in favour of listing comics because I get a far quicker return on comics and more often than not they are a higher value. So I’m left looking at adding the occasional items into sections like those in the wee hours of the morning and when I have a spare minute or two.

During March I made a return to doing some events and Comic Cons. Whilst they were a bit hit and miss they did result in a couple of nice sales

Amazing Spider-Man #10 in GD @£150

Secret Wars #8 in VFN @£125

Plus I made some interesting new contacts and they have so far resulted in the acquisition of a large collection of Heavy Metal magazines from 1977 onwards to helping out a local charity sort through a huge comic collection they were donated and how to try and derive the best value from it.

So far this year I have been offered a number of comic collections and always remain interested in improving the offering of the online store or the comics I have in various outlets like Kibworth Antiques Centre. I can’t acquire everyone I am offered (I wish I could) but those I have managed to secure have undoubtedly improved my stock. Nevertheless finding buyers for some of the bigger ticket items like Tomb of Dracula #1 and Werewolf By Night #32 and others has proved elusive. I appreciate that I am possibly not know as a website that holds huge amounts of expensive key issues but that’s part of the intended evolution of The Unreality Store and selling some of these keys will unlock some liquidity to go on and buy further collections. That first domino or two only needs to fall before things start moving 😎😂

To finish, March was great, I turned 51 so into the second half century of my life, and all was good in the hood. Onwards and upwards to April.

Are you with me?? 😎