SALES TO ASTONISH #45 - MAY 2026
Resilience - the capacity to recover, adapt, and "bounce back" quickly from difficulties, trauma, or significant adversity. It represents psychological and emotional toughness, allowing individuals to bend rather than break when faced with hardship, and to move forward without being consumed by failure
I’m finishing this column off at the beginning of June but I’d already decided to focus on the word resilience as I’ve been surprised at the how resilient I have had to be over the last seven years since I started The Unreality Store.
‘Did you expect things to be easy?’ My long-suffering partner asked me the other day.
‘No, but I didn’t expect it to be this hard’ was my response.
To contextualise this snippet of our conversation we were on the way to see The Mandalorian & Grogu, and I was bemoaning the fact the DPD had just lost 6 boxes of roleplaying games I had paid a significant amount for and was trying to explain how difficult the last seven years had been without things like this happening.
When I first started off in 2020 I don’t think I could have imagined the challenges that I faced and those that I have overcome in the past seven years. I rather naïvely started the Unreality Store thinking that with minimal promotion on social media (mainly Facebook) putting together a website that predominantly sold back issue comics would be something that collectors would flock to like bees around honey.
However, the first 24 months were a steep learning curve of getting to establish the website and the products that were available and then the last five years have largely been one of enjoyment tempered with hard work/toil in equal measure. Regular readers of this column will have read previously that success however you decide to measure it is not upwardly linear rather, it ebbs and flows there are peaks and troughs and one thing I have learned over the seven years is just how important resilience is
I write these columns at moments when I have a little time to think and reflect and during May I was sitting dictating it in the car waiting for my partner to come back from London. It was another day where things have been quiet on the website and there hadn’t been any sales taken. These days are seemingly becoming increasingly more regular, but I would guess that if I looked back over the last 4 to 5 years the average number of days where I don’t take a sale on an annual basis is pretty much the same year on year. I guess what I am trying to say is five years ago there were probably just as many zero sale days as there are will be in 2026 and have been in 2025. The key point being is sometimes you’re better able to deal with these setbacks, but actually being able to take a step back and accept that these things happen (and they happened in the past and certainly will happen in the future) is good in the context that it gives you some comfort that you’ve come a long way in seven years.
May 2026 actually turned out to be a reasonably decent month all told. At the start of the month I was able to participate in Star Wars Day and run a May 4th Be With You sale on Star Wars Comics and other science-fiction items in the store. I picked up a collection of Dark Horse Star Wars Comics at auction last year and had been slowly working my way through these listing them intermittently the last of which saw the light ahead of the sale. Anecdotally, I don’t think that these Star Wars issues appear to be as popular with comic and/or Star Wars fans in the UK then they perhaps are in the US. I’ve sold a few in the past, but if I were to be asked which company’s Star Wars Comics sells better than the others it would be Marvel over Dark Horse and IDW.
At the end of May I did a snap 50% bank off Bank Holiday sale to move some stock and generate some much needed revenue. I always feel that running these types of sales are a bit of a double edged sword. They’re very good for the reasons I’ve just mentioned, but I also feel that a particular part of my client base has been trained to wait for these opportunities to purchase and only ever buy when there’s a sale. And by this I mean putting items into carts and not checking out waiting for the opportunity to buy the items at a reduced rate.
I’ve tried to create some level of FOMO by putting on each item listing that there is only one copy available (and thankfully if it sits in someone’s cart it doesn’t disappear from the website so it’s not held and other people could buy it )but the fact of the matter is what I’ve experienced over the past two years has been a prevalence of more people holding items in carts and waiting for a sale
In essence that’s no different to other online retail businesses but I have a feeling that running regular sales to generate revenue is masking an underlying issue that people aren’t buying regularly enough at full price and therefore it forces me down a route of discounting product in order to pay the bills.
Now I’m sure that a lot of people out there know how tough things have been over the last decade or so what wth austerity, the cost of living crisis, Brexit, Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, Trump‘s tariffs or whatever other political soundbite the people who run the country come up with. I also fully appreciate that buying back issue comics or role-playing games are very low on the agenda when people want to have a holiday or buy a new car or another luxury item.
I also think that comics have become an expensive purchase when you consider how much money you pay for the time that you enjoy it. By this I’d compare reading a comic to playing a PS5 or Xbox game for example. Now there are more than a few comics that I’ve read multiple times in my lifetime but if you were buying a new comic off the shelf in your local comic shop right now and compare what it cost and how long it took to read it with how many hours of gameplay PS5 game you can understand why comics are considered perhaps even more of a luxury when there are many other forms of entertainment vying for your disposable income.
To loop back to resilience, as I was writing this column I was surprised by just how resilient I have had to be to make it to seven years in business as The Unreality Store. It’s still something I absolutely love doing, and there is something satisfying about being your own boss and having weathered all of those external challenges like the cost of living crisis etc, I’m hoping that at some point in the not too distant future things will take a turn for the better and I (and all of you reading this) enjoy a purple patch in our lives.
Did DPD find the missing boxes or did they disappear into the black hole of ‘missing’ distribution items? Tune in next month to find out.
And in the meantime keep rolling dice and reading comics!
May 2026 Key Sales
Detective #575 FN @ £12.50
Detective #576 VFN @ £12.50
Detective #577 FN @ £11.50
Detective #578 VFN @ £12.50
Marvel Comics Presents #72 FN- £5
Amazing Spider-man #362 VFN+ £22.50
Batman - Vengeance of Bane #1. VFN- £40
D20 System - City State of the Invincible Overlord NM £100
