Start of Phase Two

Well, here is the start of something new. The store is starting to run itself. Sales are about double of what I had hoped for at this point and growing. Last month was $3000 higher than the month before and this month is projecting about $2000 higher than last month. If it keeps growing like this I will be living large. To help that happen, I am expanding to the internet. I am working, with the help of a customer, on creating my own web page. This will hopefully lead to an online store, probably via eBay. If this works I will really be able to expand sales greatly.

I have purchased a ton of books since I opened (probably about 45 long boxes). Because I really don’t have the room for all of them on display in the store they are in storage. When I cleaned up for Free Comic Book Day, I moved 30 long boxes and 20 short boxes to the basement. Once I get these priced and ready for sale, I should be in good shape. Heck, even if I just stuck them all in a $1 box, I would be profiting.

The store has changed a bit as I have been growing. As soon as I get the new pics off of the camera, I will post them.

March Definitely Came in Like a Lion

Even with less than stellar weather, March has been awesome. With 11 days to go, I am $1000 away form beating February's sales totals. And the way things have been going lately, I should accomplish that Friday. There is a big Wednesday of books coming, too.

Captain America 25 -
Well, everyone else has said their peace on it, so I will add my voice to the choir. I was warned that the book would be HUGE. I normally sell 8-10 copies. I ordered 50. I only sold 20 on Wednesday, including subscribers. The fact that there were 2 covers made this really only 10. Nothing big. I knew it was all over the news, but I didn't see any new faces. Until Thursday morning. I heard about the ridiculous prices going online. So I ordered another 30, just in case. Then the new people came out of the woodwork. Lots of phone calls. A lady came in for one and bought all 7 I had on the counter display. I did not care because I still had a big batch on the shelf and if she wanted to hand me $30, fine by me. I doubt she made it back on eBay unless she got it up right away. Then I was out and started taking names. We found out later in the day that Marvel had over-printed and we could get them the next Wednesday, but only if we had reordered by noon. The tricky part is that the books were listed as out of stock, meaning "You will never, ever, see these. Or in a worst caser scenario, in 6 months when Diamond does a physical inventory and finds a box, even if you no longer need them." So, a lot of stores probably did not even attempt to do a backorder.
All but 5 of my copies were accounted for through reservations. It is not fun turning people away. We should have 2nd prints next week.

My opinion on the whole thing. The only mistake I saw was the delay getting the 2nd wave of books out and not letting us know they were out there. We were told we could get more, but only if we had placed an order 4 hours before. Marvel could not have expected the media coverage it got, but remember that we were given no, zero, nada info about the issue when ordering. No cover picture or language ("Classified"). Yes there was rampant internet speculation. But there was on Civil War 7 too, and I still have a bunch. Spider-Man going to the black costume was going to be huge too. I have a ton of those as well.

Side note on Marvel: When the Spider-Man books failed to produce (no real payoff to promised story-line, "This will change Spider-Man forever, but nothing really happened) , I slashed all of my Marvel orders and now am getting bitten by Marvel's publishing decision. I sold out of Moon Knight and Punisher War Journal Wednesday this week (both had Captain America appearances). I went ot reorder around 4pm and found out that the were both out of stock. Wow! Talk about having no faith in your product. I need more now. Well, maybe they will do a second print that I will have in a month. This really kills sales.

I have just finished remodelling the store and will take pictured once everything is organized. I took down my "High Priced" "Wow, Look at That One" wall, magazine rack and an 8 ft table of 12 boxes of back issues to make way for 12' of more New Comics shelving. I was having to overlap my new issues. I had originally left room for 300 individual titles and now I have room for about 450. We'll see how fast that fills up.

Because I lost so much room for back issues, I built (along with my father-in-law) a shelf system that holds all 36 back issue boxes that I had out on the 3 8' tables. I have a bunch of boxes of books to add to those 36 and we are building another unit that will hold another 30. I will still have 1 8' and 1 4' for my sale stuff ($1 and 25 cent books).

I have also not yet made it to eBay. That should boost sales as well, once I get myself organized enough.

That's it for today. Tomorrow is New Comics day and it should be good. Getting more statues, too.

Yeah!

6 Months in Doing Great

Well, Wednesday was my 6 month anniversary. Too bad nothing big happened in comics. Heesh.

Sales are rising every month and I keep seeing new faces as well as the old faces continuing to come back. New comics sales seem to be levelling out a little, so I am looking at other aspects to grow. Games and cards have done next to nothing here, so those will be one focus as will be moving the back issues via eBay. A website will be up in the not too distant future.

I'm still having fun. And will be taking money out to pay the bills soon.

Weeeeeeeeee!

Big Comic Book Day

Well, Wednesday should be huge. Civil War 7, Amazing Spider-Man 538 and Brave & Bold 1 are all coming out Wednesday. Hopefully the weather here will be more cooperative than last week, where I only had 3 customers. I had a huge weekend though.

I am also planning my 6 month anniversary sale. It will probably be something simply, like 25% off everything in the store. Hopefully I can move some of the statues and games that have not been selling.

February has been great so far. Am am about $2000 ahead of January at this time and I am hoping for a huge week with the big titles coming out.

Dark Tower #1 has been my biggest selling title by far. I have sold about 45 copies. My preivious champ was Civil War 6 with about 30 copies. Hopefully things will continue to grow.

I am still working on getting the large collections I purchased ready for sale. I will have an 8 foot table full of $1 books and I hope to get some of the better books on eBay soon.

I am also working on redoing my back issue display because I have run out of room for my new books and I need to steal the all that I have an 8 foot table of back issues plus my expensive books display. I will take before and after photos.

Overall things are still going great. No feeling of burnout or distress. I am still having fun every day.

Hopefully this will keep going.

Always buying!

Well this past week I have bought apporximately 3000 books form people cleaning out attics and basements. Yes, there were some of the dreaded early '90's glut (Malibu, Valiant, Image, Death of Superman, X-Force 1 - Still bagged with card!!!) but there is also a collection of approx 2400 books from the mid '70's through the mid '80's. Most of Miller's Daredevils including 158 & 168, full Crisis on Infinite Earths, Wolverine mini, huse runs of Fantastic Four, Avengers, all the key Spider-Man black cosutme appearances (well, except #300, but there are more books coming, I am told).

I will be getting a lot of these runs up on eBay as soon as I get them all sorted. I don't exactly have the workspace needed in the store to do this. I also used up my entire long box inventory getting them out of the banana boxes, file drawers adn milk crates they all came in.

Now to bag and board and price. Weeeeeee!

The Perfect Comic Book

I had heard that All-Star Superman was a perfect comic book. Bah, I said. How could anything be a perfect comic book?

Well, they were right. I just read it and it is perfect. An absolutely amazing story and wonderful art.

Read it as soon as you can.

A New Home

Well, since the title of my old blog made absolutely no sense any more, I decided to set up a new blog. And I promise to post more frequently.

The purpose of this blog will to have fun regaling you with stories of the daily running of a comic book store and my thoughts on the comic world in general.

Will anybody care? Who knows?

For starters, who the heck am I?

My name is Colin McMahon and I opened a comics books store back in September of 2006. After graduating from Penn State back back in 1990, I bounced around from many different jobs, trying to find something I wanted to do. My degree is in Economics which sadly means I am qualified to do absolutely nothing.

Waaaay back in 1993, while working at a job selling cars (not the right job for me, but it paid the bills) my wife said "You love comics, why don't you open a comics books store?" That's right. I married the best woman in the world. Well, I thought about it for quite a while. I lost my job at the dealership because all I was thinking about was opening the store. I was looking at storefronts and just about ready to sign a lease when Marvel bought Heroes World Distribution and the whole comic booc industry was turned on it's head. I backed off until things settled down. And I am glad I did. I don't think I could have survved.

One fun thing I started doing at this time was doing local conventions. Mostly small ones. I priced my then small collection and set up a table and had a blast.

I then got a job at Radio Shack, working as Christmas help to make some moeny during the holidays. I ended up sticking around and eventually ran 2 different stores in the ares. While not the greatest job, it did provide me with retail management experience, which has been invaluable to me now.

Flash forward to 1998. Beloved wife wants to get he doctorate and we move to Chicago, where my mom lives and I grew up. I start working at a law firm of a high school friend. I enjoy the work and consider going to law school. But the idea of opening a comic book store is still there in the back of my mind. I decide that how I do on my entrance exam will determine my course of action. Well I aced the LSAT and law school, here I come. Good thing too, becasue around this time or before, Marvel filed for bankruptcy and things once again got a little wonky in the comics biz.

So I finish law school adn we move back to Pittsburgh. Finding a job as a lawyer proves more difficult than I thought and I open my own office, which fails miserably. Not my true calling. Not enough of a go-getter and not confident about my ability. Eventually get a job at a title company woring 6PM to 2AM running the night shift and answering calls form evening closings. Not the best situation, but it worked well becasue I could watch the kids during the day.

After 4 years of this, I finally decided I had had enough. My mom passed awa in the fall of '05 and I finally had some money to open the store. I registered my no useless name and set up an LLC in December. In the Spring, I started looking at storefronts. I finally found a good one and left my job the end of July.

Diamond Comics Distributor required a reference to open an account, so I approached Todd McDevitt, the owner of New Dimension Comics, about helping me open an account. I had been shopping with odd since anout 1995, when I found his store between home and the Radio Shack I was running. New Dimension has 4 stores, all to the North adn East of Pittsburgh. My stor ein in the SOuth Hills of Pittsburgh and about 45 minutes from any of the other New DImensions, so I new I would not really be in competition with him directly.

Todd came back with the idea of me opening another store for him. This let me get past most of the new business problems. It also gave me access to the stock of his stores, a name with instant credibility and a larger discount than I could have gotten on my own.

So long story short, yeah right, I am now running the newest New Dimension Comics store, known as New Dimension Comics - McMurray, well, because it is in McMurray, PA. If you love in the area, please stop by. If you ever need any thing or have any questions about anything comic related, please ask away.

I promise to try to post here daily.

See ya!