I just picked up a copy of Detective 583 on ebay last night via auction. It's the 1st app of the Ventriloquist & Scarface, and regularly sells around $30-40 in mid to high grade. This auction started with an opening bid of 99 cent and I won with a $15 bid.

There's lots of stuff that starts at bids of 99 cents, $1.49, $2.49 etc. It's a matter of taking the time to look, finding a group of reliable sellers and adding them to your saved searches, etc. The largest factor in pricing though is shipping rates. A lot of books can double or triple in price because of shipping, especially when you are getting books in the $1-5 range and not buying multiple books from the seller. I have a handful of sellers that start 90% of their books at 99 cents (the rest are usually slabbed books wit buy it nows that I have no interest in) including books from the 50s-current (I've picked up a few Toth issues of Four Color from the 50s from them over the last couple of years that had starting bids of 99 cents).

I don't buy from ebay all that often (maybe 6-8 times in a year) but I have a set of saved searches and saved sellers that I peruse to see if anything of interest comes up in the price range I prefer. I do use ebay to scan sold prices for some of the books on my want list so I have a reference for them when I am at shows or back issue hunting to determine if a price is fair, a bargain, or overpriced. I hadn't used ebay in years, I sold a lot of comics there circa 1998-2006, but took a break and didn't really use it again until the pandemic. It's certainly changed over the years, but then so has the back issue market as a whole because time passed, nothing is ever static unless its dead, and the only constant is change, however there are still bargains to be found if one know how and where to look.

That said, I think the biggest reason large lots are no longer offered on ebay as often as they used to be has more to do with the USPS than ebay or anything else. Postal rates for large boxes, even for flat rate boxes, increased exponentially in the past decade and a half. Shipping for such lots now runs anywhere from $20-40 depending on size, if it fits in a flat rate box or not, and where its being shipped. No one wants to buy a cheap lot of 10-20 books for $5 and have it end up costing them $25-$40 once shipping is calculated. Also in the last 20 years, US tax regulations have been altered and ebay sellers now have to charge and pay sales tax on what they sell, so the total cost for the buyer on those lots (and single books) are going to be higher. Add tax and shipping to the cheap lots, and they became unattractive to both buyers and sellers.

-M

There’s a science fiction magazine published here, although it does ship worldwide. The editor is trying to encourage foreign subscribers to go digital because he says that Royal Mail’s postage costs are meaning there is very little, if any, profit on mailing out magazines to the likes of Australia.

It’s a shame. I know Royal Mail (or any country’s postal service) has to make a profit, I get that, but it does seem a lot of small businesses, publishers and the like are struggling. And not just with worldwide mailings, but internal mailings, too. Magazines seem to be a dying business here, but what doesn’t help are huge postage costs.

Honestly, put comics aside for a moment, I worry for the future of magazines. Very few small stores here stock them; the corner shop by me stopped even newspapers a while back, he now has a Wall’s ice cream freezer in place of where the newspapers and magazines used to be. Some corner shops have stopped selling periodicals, altogether. Supermarkets often have a token selection of magazines, but even they seem to be stocking fewer titles - and the titles they do stock are mainstream ones, e.g. railways, gossip magazines and car magazines. Niche publications (e.g. retro sci-fi) won’t really be found there.

Which only leaves one game in town here: WHSmith. However, some publishers have claimed that not only do WHSmith take a percentage of sales (which is understandable), but also charge “rental space” on their shelves for top titles (that doesn’t seem fair). That is why some niche publications don’t even end up on the shelves of WHSmith.

It’s sad, but I feel unless you’re a car magazine, railway magazine or football (soccer) magazine, you’ve got no chance. It’s also been years since I’ve seen comics - UK or US - in any kind of greengrocers or corner shop.

So, subscriptions are probably the only way forward for publishers, especially niche ones, but if the likes of Royal Mail are making postal costs prohibitive, well I wonder if we’ll end up in a world without magazines.

When I was selling, the clerk at our local post office checked every media mail package to make sue there were no periodicals in it, so I couldn't use Media Mail unless I was selling trades, and even that was iffy. The other issue with Media (and this may have changed) it didn't come with tracking or insurance, and once you paid for those it was almost as expensive as priority (whose price included those features) and if something happened to the package en route, you wouldn't know w/o tracking and were out the cost of whatever you were selling plus what you paid for shipping as you would have to refund the seller and eat the loss (and likely get negative feedback because of it all. You also had to pay for the boxes used with media where priority boxes were free, which also added to the cost of media shipping that you couldn't pass on to the customer without risking negative or neutral feedback. So weighing all the risk/reward elements, I usually opted for Priority rather than Media to avoid all the other risk and cost factors even if it was a little more expensive. But a lot of sellers don't consider costs beyond the actual difference in price of shipping and buyers never consider that when requesting media mail to save a few bucks.

-M

If you definite 'a lot' as "a teeny weeny minuscule fraction, in proportion to what there previously was" then sure.

Well when I looked the other night there were over 400 comic lots starting under $3. Less sure, but not an insignificant amount either. There wee even several score of "penny starts" last time I looked as well. So sure, there are less, but there are less places selling penny candy now too. Time has passed, prices have gone up. The world and the market isn't static and isn't frozen in amber when we were young so it's the same now that we are old. The only constant is change, and prices rarely rarely go done. I'm not sure I can name one market, let alone a collectibles market, where prices are the same as it was 20 years ago. Why would you expect someone to be selling things as if it were 2004 in 2024 in any market? That seems to be a problem with expectations, not the current state or reality.

-M