What's Your Price Limit?

[Ruin Explorer]

eBay is really easy to do, particularly when you use the buy it now option. Add fair postage on top of the price you want for the item. Buy a bulk pack of book sleeves online for £15 and a roll of bubble wrap for similar and make sure you specify UK or Europe only on your listings (shipping further can get very pricy)

For photos I used the rear white side of a white poster laid flat on the living room floor and took photos of front, rear and spine on my phone camera. Then did all the listings straight from my phone.

You can decide your pricing by looking what the product is going for already on eBay. If you want a quick sale then undercut the lowest by 50p. If you have time then go with the median price for that item. If the product isn’t listed then go high particularly if the book is out of print. You can always reduce your price if it doesn’t sell. You can also add a make an offer button so see what people are willing to pay.
I sold 80% of my collection before I moved and made about £2k just on the RPG books.

Make sure the communication is really good, respond quickly to buyers, don’t misrepresent the product and make sure any damage is really clearly specified - with an extra photo if there is any damage so people can make a conscious buying decision. The 5 star reviews will roll in. That’s probably the most important bit.

i appreciate that is quite a bit of unsolicited advice but it might be useful for someone on here.

Nah I appreciate the advice and it makes sense. I haven't sold anything on eBay for like a decade or more and then it was only 1-2 things.

Not Ebay. Once a month, we have flea market where people sell books, comics, vinyl records. It's mostly alternative crowd (punks, metalheads, goths) and younger crowd, which intersects with gaming crowd fair bit. Also, that venue is 5 minutes walking distance from Faculty of electrical engineering and Faculty of mechanical engineering, so fair bit of students come, and there are fair bit of gamers among them. Also, we have wargaming&modeling association and gaming (ttrpg,boardgames) association, so just posting "for sale" add in their groups.

Ahhhh that's really cool - I don't know anything like that round my way (North London) but it could easily exist and I just don't know because I'm in my 40s and I bet most people doing that are a fair bit younger.

 

[LordEntrails]

Also, one good thing about physical copies (at least for fairly mainstream and popular games). If you buy them, flip trough, don't like or worse, never open them, you can usually flip them for almost same price you bought them or trade it for something of similar value. PDFs? Nope. You bought it, if you don't use it, you can't resell it.

PDF is not the only digital format. And depends where you buy digital from. I buy digital on Fantasy Grounds usually, and they have a 30 day money back refund period. So yea, you don't have to try and resell it (which admittedly you can't do) if you don't like it to get your money back.

 

[John Dallman]

I don't have a price limit, although I'm more likely to buy something in PDF than paper, simply on the grounds of storage space. Things that make me more likely to buy something include:

• Does it look interesting?
• Can I integrate it with something I have already run, or plan to run?
• Is it well-written and well-edited?
• Is the publisher reliable?

Artwork has little importance to me; I don't object to it, but I don't find it very inspirational either.

An example of something that was a terrible disappointment for me was Modipius' Assault on the Mountains of Madness. I've made a lot of use of Chaosium's Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and a return to the area a decade later was attractive. It looked very interesting, and I could integrate it with stuff I had already run.

The problem was the research and the editing. The book is dual-stated for Savage Worlds and CoC. It was evidently written with SW as the primary target, and is pulpy by pulp standards. There are lots of things the villains have accomplished which aren't possible within the story as described. There are lots of things that reveal a total lack of research, which make the start of the plot nonsensical. I trawled it for useful ideas, and didn't find much. Selling me a Modipius product since then has been very hard.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem was the research and the editing. The book is dual-stated for Savage Worlds and CoC. It was evidently written with SW as the primary target, and is pulpy by pulp standards. There are lots of things the villains have accomplished which aren't possible within the story as described. There are lots of things that reveal a total lack of research, which make the start of the plot nonsensical. I trawled it for useful ideas, and didn't find much. Selling me a Modipius product since then has been very hard.

This is a side comment, but the above paragraph made me think of it:

There is nothing more annoying than someone who makes multiple versions of a product for different systems, but clearly doesn't get someone more familiar than they may to go over it and make sure it makes sense. I've hit small versions I could shrug about, but I hit one product produced for D&D adjacency that was then also produced for Savage Worlds where they extremely clearly were trying to make SW look more like D&D and doing a really bad job of it (this may not be impossible; I gather there's some elements of the Pathfinder products ported to SW that do a decent job of it, but the item I reference above wasn't even in a country mile of it). In another case, someone who'd done an honestly really well done superhero product did a conversion document to make it work with Mutants and Masterminds, and did not bother to learn the latter enough to know that some things that would work okay in the original system it was done for (Icons I believe) would not work in M&M, and in fact anyone really experienced with M&M would look at the way the characters involved where characterized in the text and realize they'd work out in no way similar in play.

If you want to sell to multiple systems, do a little heavy lifting, people.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Re: Selling/Trading RPG items

I know rpg.net has a thread for it, is there something similar here at enworld.org?

 

[GrimCo]

Ah, so you're in a situation where reselling unwanted game books is both easy and cost effective. A fairly atypical one for most people, though.

It would be way more easy and cost effective to sell it online. Unfortunately, Ebay isn't really a thing here for buying/selling used stuff and with postage prices, sending it cross border to another EU country costs 8-12e, so it's not worth it. It's just cheaper for me and the buyer to hop in car or public transit and spend half hour to hour and half and make sale in person locally. I would guess that if you live in bigger city, chances are, there similar opportunities, you just need to dig a bit.

@Ruin Explorer

Guy that organises that flea market is in his late 50s, originally it was for selling alternative music records, but over time it expanded to all kinds of stuff and like i said, alternative and geek culture has large intersection. Wargaming/modeling association was founded in 2003 by guys who are now in mid 40s with fair number of members in late 30s and 40s. Gaming association also has fair bit of older people in it (in their 40s and 50s), including founders. Association is just legal form for non profit entity formed by citizens. In UK that would be something like Unincorporated association according to chatgpt. In big city like London, there has to be something similar.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In big city like London, there has to be something similar.

I don't think there is, actually, not that does trading and stuff, the sort of people I know I should have heard of it. But I'll keep an eye/ear out in case I just wasn't paying attention.

Re: unincorporated association - yeah it would be perfectly legal to do it, it's just I've never heard of that - well, not since the 1990s.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It would be way more easy and cost effective to sell it online. Unfortunately, Ebay isn't really a thing here for buying/selling used stuff and with postage prices, sending it cross border to another EU country costs 8-12e, so it's not worth it. It's just cheaper for me and the buyer to hop in car or public transit and spend half hour to hour and half and make sale in person locally. I would guess that if you live in bigger city, chances are, there similar opportunities, you just need to dig a bit.

The problem with eBay is you need to fuss around with shipping and setting up the sale. At least the first part is more trouble than at least some of us are willing to go to. I don't even like to go through the hassle of returning damaged goods most of the time, though I'll do it if an item is pricey..