Q&A: Is a home-based comic book store a good idea?

QUESTION: I read your book, "The Home-Based Bookstore" and loved it. What's your opinion of comics? I grew up collecting comic books, and have always wanted a comic shop. I wonder if I could have a home-based bookstore that specialized in comic art books.

ANSWER: I have heard from several people who bought my book who specialize in comics. It was not a category of merchandise I'd thought much about until I heard from these people.

Recently I heard from one lady who discovered that she could find sexually explicit comics fairly easily at used bookstores and resell them online for very good prices. She had no problem with selling them to adults who wanted them. This is probably a category of merchandise that tends to sell well online, since lots of people would be embarassed to buy it in person.

So yes, I think this is something that's certainly feasible using the home-based bookstore model. The difficulty with it is there's probably a vast amount of material you'd come across that does not have an ISBN, and so it would not automatically be listable on Amazon.

However, if you're a Pro-Merchant seller on Amazon, you can add items to the catalog. I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to list them under "books" or not. Here's a tutorial for adding items to Amazon's catalog.

I suspect that there's an active market on eBay for comics, and perhaps that would be a better place to sell them, particularly collectibles. And as you probably know it's getting easier every day to build your own Web site to sell items -- although I'd recommend getting your feet wet on a venue like eBay or Amazon when you're first learning the ropes.