Chapter 11
Breaking Up an Album
If you are considering selling individual stamps
from an album or individual countries from a world-wide album set, you
should read this chapter.
Remember the nineteen categories from the inventory you did in
chapter 5?
You can treat any of those nineteen categories as individual collections,
and you can sell each separately if you like. For example, you might start
with the MNH USA sheets, booklets, and coils and experiment with selling
just those. This will give you practice, introduce you to Scott numbers,
and perhaps let you attend a stamp show or meet a few dealers.
If you are selling your collection, your goal should be to sell it in the
most profitable manner in the most reasonable amount of time. Don’t be
afraid to split the collection into small homogeneous units and sell each
unit in a different way.
Suppose one of the items in those nineteen categories is an album set of
some sort. You can sell the album set, as an album set, with everything
that happens to be inside. You also can sell individual stamps and/or
countries from within the album set. This is what I mean by breaking up
the album. You may or may not want to consider this.
Here are some guidelines you need to know:
1. This is going to take time, probably a lot of time. It may take several
hours a day for weeks, months, even years. Are you willing to donate that
much time? Do you have that much time? What is your family going to think
of your spending a lot of time stamp decollecting (a term of my own
design!)?
2. If you remove the valuable items from an album, you will leave
low-value items. People will often buy the low-value items if they are in
the same album with higher-value items, but may not buy the low-value
items by themselves. However, if you do remove the high value items, you
may still be able to sell the low value items to a different kind of
buyer, perhaps someone at a stamp club who is looking for a starter
collection.
3. As I have found, there are only a few ways to break up an album: a)
become an APS member, and put stamps in circuit books, or b) use the
Internet. Choice a) requires you to establish credit worthiness and wait
around two months before being able to access their services. Choice b)
pretty much requires that you already have a computer and use a service
such as eBay.
4. If you pick choice 3a, you will leave a lot of low-value stamps. Unless
you want to give them away, you really also need choice 3b.
5. You will generate income if you price your stamps reasonably, but it
will take a great deal of time. APS circuit books circulate for 18 months.
If it takes you a month to prepare one, that’s 19 months to get your money
from it assuming what you put in the circuit book sold. If it didn’t sell,
you may have to try again at a lower price.
6. Learning to prepare APS circuit books takes a lot of time in itself.
You will need to learn about using a stamp catalog, watermarks,
perforations, prices, etc. And then actually putting the stamps into the
books takes a lot of time.
7. If you sell an entire album, you gain the advantage of averages.
Some stamps are better than others, but you are selling the entire thing
for one price so individual stamp differences don’t matter much. If you
are selling individual stamps, individual differences do matter. Unless
you price each stamp very carefully, people will buy the better stamps and
leave you with the less desirable stamps. This means you cannot price
easily such as asking 60% SCV for every stamp. Some you may want 100%, and
some you may only want 10%. It means you have to spend a lot more time.
(Of course, you can do anything you want. If you want to price
everything at 50% of SCV and hope most of it sells, that’s fine too. Just
have a strategy for what to do with the remnants.)
8. Keep costs in mind. APS circuit books cost money. So do stamp mounts
to put the stamps into the books. Plus there is postage and insurance
costs to mail the books to APS. APS charges 2% of the value for insurance,
then 30% of what sells as their commission. (They earn every penny of it,
too!) If you are dealing with the Internet, you have listing fees and
final-value fees.
9. Chapter 16 discusses additional information on APS circuit books.
Chapter 15 presents information on selling stamps via the Internet for
those of you who might be interested in considering that topic.
10. Other possibilities you might consider are:
Allowing members at a local stamp club to purchase right out of the album
at, say, 75% for mint and 60% for used (with stamps in poor condition
discounted appropriately).
Taking the higher value material out of the albums for sale to a dealer or
at auction. Then sell the rest to a collector.
11. Once you get started on this path of breaking up an album, you are
more or less committed to following through. If you sell ten countries out
of a world-wide album, that may decrease the salability of the rest of the
album set through other means discussed in this book.
Let me relate my personal experiences in breaking up album sets. When I
started doing it several years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. (I
would have liked to have had a copy of this book back then!) I used a
combination of APS circuit books and the Internet.
By my (now educated!) estimates, I could have gotten $x months ago by
selling the whole collection at an auction or to a dealer. By breaking up
the album sets, I’ll probably get $2x. On the surface, that looks good,
twice as much money. However, that is assuming the time I put in on the
project is worth nothing. If you count my time, I have been working for
well less than the minimum wage.
You are probably not going to pull off breaking up albums if you have a
full-time job and/or a family, or if you do not enjoy the detail work of
working with stamps. (And if you do enjoy the detail work of working with
stamps, perhaps you should keep some of the collection and become an
active collector yourself!)
