Sometimes you just get lucky

Ask anyone who sells on Craigs List, Ebay or Amazon and they'll tell you sometimes you just get lucky. Take my brother, for example, who makes the equivalent of a second salary selling on Amazon (whereas I'm only making enough to pay a few bills each month.) He's found several gems over the last couple of years. Here are two examples. At one yardsale he spied a copy of Harry Potter that looked just a little bit different - different size, dust jacket, etc. Upon examining it he found it was a first edition... from England... selling for $2000. +!

His wife is into old Westerns so they were at a Western movie convention last year and there was a vendor selling old Western novels. He found one - title and author escape me - first edition worth $600. Coincidentally the author of the book was also there signing newer copies of his novels - one of those deals where you have to BUY a copy to have it signed. So he walked across the street, paid the author the price of a new copy and had the original signed. That inflated the worth.

Me, I usually find books and CDs worth $10, $20 - $50. Occasionally I'll find a factory-sealed game or toy worth $100 or so.

Yesterday I hit an estate sale. Now, estate sales are not often profitable. The estate owner and sale organizers usually price the items way too high which is why I don't always go to them. This particular house was owned by either a musician, producer or an extreme music fan because there was over-priced memorabilia everywhere. Lots of things I would have loved to have but way out of my budget.

In the corner I spied a box of old music-related magazines marked $2. each. I'm sure each one meant something to the estate owner because there were no complete collections - just random copies of Billboard, Hit Parader, Rollingstone, etc. My brother recently told me the market for old magazines is growing but the problem with them is you can't scan their barcodes (usually) to get an Amazon price. You either have to take a picture and upload it to Amazon's search application or type the name and description of the magazine in - both time consuming. So I set out to to do just that to some of the more interesting magazines I saw... $20 here, $35 there...

So I came to a copy of Playgirl from August 1995 that has Type O Negative's Peter Steele featured in it. I ALMOST passed it over but thought "why not?" Glad I did! It lists on Amazon from $220. to $250! So I put my new purchased copy up there with the others.

Of course, knowing how much something is worth is worthless unless someone buys it. And the rank on this is pretty low. But still, everything eventually sells and this has been my most valuable find in my short history of selling on Amazon.