Hello again, thank you for visiting and reading this month’s Mutation blog. It’s been an interesting few months since we opened. Sales have been coming in at a nice pace. I can’t emphasize enough how much we appreciate each and every sale. At the very least, I hope it's reflected in the work put into packing each order and our attempts to include extras.
I know shipping is expensive and I truly wish I could offer free shipping (for orders below $49). It’s just not a reality for a store our size right now. So, I try to make sure every order that goes out is given some extra TLC. Thanks again for your patronage and support!
This is old news at this point, but the Trenton Charity Comic-Con has been postponed until June 2024. We are excited to participate as a vendor at that time! In the meantime, I’m looking for more opportunities to sell in person. I’ll share any news I get on socials. If anyone has any leads, please reach out!
Newly released issues and graphic novels are continuing to be added to the store weekly, along with new action figures and kids' books. I hope to add pre-orders very soon allowing you to reserve your copies with Mutation. I’m just about done with all the coding required to make this happen. We will also be offering discounts and other incentives for pre-orders, so please stay tuned.
I’ve been working on cleaning up the website, improving graphics and performance… all the stuff I’m sure you’re dying to hear about. I hope it looks a little nicer, I’m happy with it (for now).
Concerning the Grading, Photographing and Sorting of Back-Issues
You may have noticed the new “$2 Bin” added to the front page and menus. A large percentage of our back-issues have been re-priced and placed in this “Bin” (for lack of a better word). We also have a large number of back-issues that still need to be added to the store, many of them are prime for the $2 Bin (in a good way). Stay tuned for that.
When I built this store, my goal was to provide photos for every pre-owned comic on the website. I’m starting to realize that it may not be realistic, or even necessary when it comes to books priced below $5. So, in the interest of getting more books online for people to buy, I plan to start using stock-images for the books in the $2 Bin.
The books that were already photographed will remain as they are but going forward any newly added comic (pre-owned or otherwise) priced below $5 will feature stock images.
Anything priced over $5-10 is still going to feature actual photos (front, back and more if needed) because I think that is a reasonable expectation. As for the grading, well that's an area where I need to do some thinking...
Personally, I’m not very comfortable with assigning grades to books because it can be so subjective. I’d feel much better describing a book's condition in terms of “Low”, "Mid” and “High” with maybe a “Very high” for books that are essentially ‘Near Mint’ to the naked eye.
I’ve seen other stores using variations of this scale and I’m leaning towards it for the books under $5. For a book that someone is spending $10+ I think it's fair to try and give it some estimated grade. I’ll continue to round down and preface every grade with “I am not a Professional Grader”.
Okay that's enough. If you read this far, thanks! Be back with another update next month.
