Make Money Selling Prints and Advertisements on eBay

Old prints are good sellers, especially popular themes like animals, sports (especially golf and horse racing), royalty, music hall artists, topographical (named locations) and children.

Very early / old  magazines and periodicals contained lots of prints, and advertisements,  the best being Illustrated London News and Punch. All you do is remove prints carefully, trim the rough edges, package to protect and make them more attractive, then list them on eBay.

These tips will help you get started in this hugely profitable business:

    Frame your prints for extra add-on value. Look for old (antique and modern) picture frames at car boot and garage sales, flea markets and collectors’ fairs, and make a point of visiting auctions where boxes of frames can be bought cheaply.

    Hand-colour and mount or frame black and white prints and engravings to increase the value of even the most common and cheapest print.

    Give a Certificate of Authenticity. This is simply a sheet of paper, with or without decorative border, which testifies that the print is original and taken from a specific source published on a particular date. The certificate is always taped lightly to the back of the print in the mount so that it cannot be removed and added to another print obtained elsewhere.

    Make your listing for the print descriptive and include details that are likely to attract bidders.

    Make sure your listings include age, theme, date and source of your prints.

    If your original book is special, say a first edition, or a limited edition, say so in your listing. To people viewing your listings it might make the difference between a sale and giving your product the miss.

    Take great care removing prints from publications. Open the book midway and fold it back on itself, which makes it very easy to break or weaken the spine and therefore loosen the pages.

    A great place to get quality mounts very inexpensively is on eBay itself. Go to the search facility, request a search for items locally, and use keywords like: “mounts”, “photo mounts”, and wait for a nice selection of suppliers to appear, some selling items by auction, others offering “Buy It Now”.

    When you find a good supplier stick to that person, and even buy their items outside of eBay (without breaking eBay’s rules).