My name is Doug Labonte. I'm 46, I fix furnaces for a living, and for about twenty years I've collected old fishing lures. Wooden plugs mostly, the kind with glass eyes and the paint crazed all over, from the 1920s through the '50s. I have boxes of them. My wife would say I have too many boxes of them, and starting in the fall of 1998 I decided she was right and I'd try selling the doubles on the big auction site everybody talks about.

I'd never sold anything on a computer. I'd only had the computer since Christmas '97. A year later, I have sold 214 lures and a few reels to people in 38 states and Canada, and I've learned about ten things the hard way. This page is those ten things. I'm not going to tell you it's a way to get rich. It's a way to turn a closet into money if you're careful, and lose your shirt if you're not.

September 1998. I signed up, which took about ten minutes, and listed one lure: a Creek Chub Pikie, wooden, glass eyes, no box, decent paint. I had no picture, because I didn't have any way to take one. I wrote three lines. I started it at $5. It sold for $14 to a fellow in Ohio, and I stood there in the spare bedroom staring at the screen thinking, somebody in Ohio just paid me fourteen dollars for a lure I'd have traded for a sandwich at a swap meet.

Then the next four I listed without pictures went for almost nothing, and I learned the first thing. No picture, no money. People will not bid real money on something they can't see. Would you?

My brother-in-law has a digital camera, the kind that saves the pictures to a regular floppy disk, and he's a soft touch, so I've had it more than he has this year. It takes a picture about 640 by 480, which is plenty. You can also shoot regular film, get it developed, and scan the prints, and I did that for a while; it works, it's just slow and it costs you a roll of film and a week every time.

What I learned about lure pictures, which mostly applies to anything small:

• Daylight. Set up by a window on a cloudy day, or outside in open shade. The flash on a digital camera makes everything look like a police photo and washes out the paint.
• A plain background. A piece of light blue poster board curved up behind the lure. Not the kitchen table, not a towel. The eye goes to the thing, not the pattern.
• Get close. The lure should fill the frame. Most of these cameras have a close-up setting, look for a little flower symbol.
• Show the bad parts. If there's a chip or a missing hook, take a second picture of it. This sounds backwards, but it's the single most important thing on this page. A buyer who sees the chip and bids anyway is a happy buyer. A buyer who finds the chip in the mailbox is an angry one, and you'll hear about it in feedback.
• Keep the file small. I save them as JPEG at around 20 to 30K. Most of the people bidding are on a 56K modem like me, and if your picture takes a minute to load, they've gone to the next lure.

Uploading the picture to the auction listing is the part that gave me the most trouble. What I do now is put the pictures on a page here on my GeoCities.us space and point the listing at them. It took me two evenings and a lot of muttering to figure that out the first time, and now it takes five minutes.

The title is what people search for, so it has to have the words in it that a collector would type. "Old fishing lure" is useless. "Heddon Lucky 13 wood glass eyes" is what they type. Maker, model, material, eyes, and the color if you know the name of it. You get about 45 letters, so use them.

The description, in this order:

1. What it is, again, in a sentence.
2. Size, in inches. Measure it.
3. Condition, honestly. Paint, eyes, hooks, hardware. Lure collectors have their own grading words but plain English works fine: "paint is about 80%, some crazing all over, one small chip on the belly (see 2nd photo), hooks are old but not original."
4. Whether it has the box. A lure in its original box can be worth a lot more than the lure alone, and the box alone is worth listing by itself.
5. Your terms: how you take payment, what shipping costs, when you ship.

What I don't do anymore: write "RARE!!!" and "L@@K" and use nine exclamation points. The serious buyers, the ones with the money, skip those listings. A calm, specific, honest description sells better and gets you better feedback. It also gets you fewer e-mails asking things you should have said in the first place.

A note on starting prices: I start almost everything at $5 with no reserve. It gets people bidding, and if a lure is worth $40, the collectors know it and they'll get it to $40 by themselves. The few times I tried a high reserve, nobody bid and I paid the listing fee for nothing.

I ship everything by U.S. Mail from the post office on Tuesday and Friday mornings before work. Here's the routine:

• Wrap the lure in a piece of tissue, then bubble wrap, then put it in a small box. Not a padded envelope. A treble hook will go right through a padded envelope and the sorting machine, and you'll be mailing a refund. I get little boxes free from the shoe store and from the pharmacy.
• Most lures ship first class for under two dollars. Anything heavier, or if the buyer's in a hurry, goes Priority Mail, which is $3.20 for up to two pounds and gets there in two or three days most places.
• I now pay the little bit extra for delivery confirmation, which the post office started offering this spring. It gives you a number that proves it was delivered. See "Scams" below for why.
• Insurance on anything over about $50. It's cheap and one lost package pays for a year of it.
• I put a printed note in the box: thanks, here's my e-mail if anything's wrong, please leave feedback. Costs nothing, and people mention it.

Tell people in the listing exactly what shipping will cost, before they bid. The number one complaint on the whole auction site, near as I can tell, is sellers who spring a $9 "shipping and handling" charge on a $6 item. Charge what it costs you, maybe a quarter for the box and tape, and say so up front.

Canada: I've shipped about fifteen lures up there. Fill out the little green customs form at the counter, it's not hard. It takes a week or two.

After a sale, the buyer and the seller each leave a public comment about the other. That's your reputation, and it's the only thing a stranger has to go on when deciding whether to send you a check. I have 190-some positives and one neutral (a guy who said the lure was "smaller than expected"; it was the size I said it was, in inches, but there you go).

What I've figured out: leave feedback for the buyer the day their payment clears. Don't wait to see what they say about you. Be specific in the note: "Paid fast, easy to deal with, thanks." And if something goes wrong, fix it by e-mail before anybody types anything public. I've refunded twice and taken a lure back once. Both times the buyer left me a positive anyway, which tells you something.

So figure I cleared somewhere around $2,800 before taxes, for maybe five hours a week, on stuff that was sitting in a closet. I don't think that's bad. I also don't think it's a job. The people who make a living at this are buying at estate sales every weekend and listing fifty things a week, and that's a different life than mine.

What sold best, if you're curious: anything Heddon, anything with the original box, and anything in an unusual color. What sat: modern plastic lures, anything I described as "some rust," and reels, which are heavy to ship and which the reel collectors seem to have their own channels for.

Most people are honest. Out of 214 buyers I've had real trouble with three. But here's what to watch for, as a seller:

• The bounced check. Wait for personal checks to clear before you ship. I mean actually clear, which at my bank takes about a week, not just "deposited." I shipped a lure on a check that bounced and I'm out $22 plus the lure. Once. Money orders and cashier's checks you can ship on right away.
• "It never came." A buyer says the package didn't arrive and wants a refund. Usually it's true and it's the post office. Sometimes it isn't. Delivery confirmation ends the argument either way, which is why I pay for it now.
• The deadbeat bidder. Wins the auction, never pays, never answers e-mail. It happens maybe one in twenty for me. Send two polite e-mails a few days apart, then the auction site has a process for it and you can offer the lure to the next-highest bidder. Don't take it personally. Don't send a nasty e-mail; it doesn't help and it comes back to you.
• Bid shielding and shill bidding. I've read about both and I think I've seen shill bidding once (a seller bidding on his own item under another name to run the price up). As a seller, the thing to know is: don't do it, they can trace it, and you'll get thrown off.
• E-mails asking for your password. Nobody real will ever ask you for it. Delete them.

And a headache that isn't a scam: the buyer who, after the auction ends, wants to negotiate. "Would you take $10 instead of $16?" No. The auction's the negotiation. Be polite about it.

I'm not a tax man. I asked one, and here's what he told me in plain words, and then you should ask your own.

The money is income, and the government wants to know about it. Whether it's a "hobby" or a "business" in their eyes matters for how you report it and what expenses you can take off, and the difference has to do with whether you're really trying to make a profit and keeping records like a business would. Either way you're supposed to report what you made. What I do is keep every receipt for boxes and postage and fees in a folder, keep the printout of every completed auction, and hand the folder to the tax preparer in February. Cost me a little extra on the return last year. Cheaper than the alternative.

The other thing he mentioned: if I sell to somebody in my own state, my state wants sales tax on it, which meant I had to get a little sales tax permit from the state. It took one form. Most of my buyers are out of state, so it's a few dollars a year, but it's a thing to know.

If you know somebody who does books, ask them; there are a couple of bookkeepers with pages on this site (Carol Anne's Bookkeeping & Tax Service and Balanced Books by Brenda) and I'd guess they've heard this question before.

1. Get pictures figured out before listing a single thing.
2. Start a ledger on day one. A notebook is fine. Every sale, every expense, every stamp.
3. Buy bubble wrap by the roll, not the little bag from the drugstore.
4. Write one good description and reuse the format. I have mine saved in Notepad.
5. Ship twice a week on a schedule and say so in the listing. Buyers don't mind waiting if they know when.
6. Don't list on a holiday weekend. Nobody's home to bid.
7. Answer every e-mail the same day, even the dumb ones. Especially the dumb ones. That's a buyer.
8. Keep the good stuff. I sold a lure in March I still think about. The money's spent and the lure's in Ohio.

Year two starts now. I've got a few boxes left, and my wife has started leaving things from the basement on the spare bedroom desk with a look on her face, so I guess I'm branching out.