Success, Failure, Fun

Jiminy, if ever I need to be reminded about things being relative, all one has to do is start to feel some joy and confidence in one's business successes and then talk to someone else--to quickly realize that when it comes to selling comic books, I'm only a small potato in the big patch.

Fact of the matter is, since I started selling on eBay some five or six years ago, my sales for the most part steadily, if irregularly, increased marginally each month. Hey, more sales is more money, and it is still qualified as 'fun' as far as I'm concerned. When I opened up my eBay store, sales remarkably became quite consistent and got punched up to what we'll call 'levels around the turn of the century'. (is this vague? it's supposed to be)

Now, every once in awhile, my sales would spike considerably into the future...say, the mid 35th century or so, and wow! Exciting! And manageable...every once in a century...or month. In January of this year, I started listing items on amazon just to increase my number of sales venues, and that proved to add a century or two to my sales experience. All well and good, but then, this summer, things just went berzerko such that even Rip Hunter, Time Master, would have felt the pressure.

Suddenly each month I'm adding close to a fricking EON to my monthly sales experience. I'm pushing into the 40th century AD, and even at times into the 50th century and beyond. Astounding--marvelous, and scary! And all when my regular day job is becoming a bit more demanding than it ever was before.

The result has been that my fulfillment has slowed down by a factor of up to a week at worst.

The good news is that my son is proving to be a very reliable worker in helping me do fulfillment; while he doesn't necessarily love the work that he's doing, he likes the 'paycheck' (I pay him cash for each hour worked), and I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to set him loose 100% on fulfillment which will make him my 'numbah one son'.

I like having him work for me; it's nice to have him around while I do work in my comic book warehouse,

And so-- the eBay Toyo Days Comics experience continues on--with my 1st employee.

On a related note, considering that my sales have increased as they have, it's also correlated to an increase in my purchasing: I haven't been actively seeking out more inventory to buy from collectors, but it's been made available and one thing I have to do is take advantage of the opportunities to buy when I can. And I have--it's just that I have less time to process all that stuff.

Originally, my wife thought that the blog would be a useful selling tool; direct my cohort of regular customers to the blog so that they could see my thoughts on comic books and the like, but for me--personally, the blog isn't about selling. It's about observing my own life and successes...and failures...and where things don't even go south or north, but stay the same.

I enjoy it. Thanks for reading...all eleventeen of you.