For comic shops & professional sellers
NuGrade turns a three-minute phone capture into an evidence-backed condition report your buyer can open from the listing. No shipping, no encapsulation, and the book never leaves your shop.
The raw discount
You know the difference between a sharp copy and a soft one across the counter. In a listing, that difference collapses into three photos and a one-word description, and the buyer prices the uncertainty, not the book.
Every raw listing collects the same questions. How is the spine? Any color breaks? Can you show the staples? Each answer is staff time, and each unanswered one is a buyer who moves on.
A report answers all of it before anyone asks, with the photos and video frames the answers came from.
When condition is a guess, buyers price the guess. Your sharp, tightly-stapled copy competes against a soft one with the same three photos and the same one-word description.
A cited grade and a defect list separate your copy from a description anyone could write.
Professional grading fees plus shipping both ways are worth it on the right book. On the rest, they quietly eat the margin the book was supposed to earn.
Grade in-store first, then send out only the books whose grade justifies the trip.
The math
One rate per book, and the book never leaves your shelf. The other column is a fee, two shipping labels, an insurance premium, and weeks of shelf time before anything sells. Sending a book away is the right answer for some of your inventory and an expensive answer for the rest of it.
| Per raw book | Sending it awayProfessional third-party grading | Grading it in-storeNuGrade report |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per book | Per-book fee, plus shipping both ways and insurance | One rate per book, quoted for your volume. Nothing ships, nothing is insured |
| Turnaround | Weeks to months, plus the queue | Minutes of your time, not weeks of theirs |
| Where the book sits | In transit, then in someone else's building | On your shelf, in your custody, the entire time |
| What the buyer gets | A sealed, tamper-evident holder | A dated public report with cited photo and video evidence, opened by QR or short ID |
| Practical for | Keys, high-grade copies, and books that need in-hand restoration screening | Everything else: bins, wall books, runs, sets, and consignment intake |
We are not asking you to stop grading books. A NuGrade report is an evidence-bounded opinion from your captures, not an in-hand inspection and not a tamper-evident holder, and it says so on the report. Keep sending out the copies where the holder is part of the value. What changes is how many books you have to guess about in the meantime.
What to grade in-store
Not every comic is a candidate for encapsulation, and most of your raw inventory was never going to be. These are the books that go undocumented by default.
Bins, runs, sets, mid-grade commons, the second and third copy of a book you already have. Per-book fees plus shipping both ways can be a real fraction of what the comic sells for, so the condition never gets documented at all and the buyer prices it accordingly.
Wall books a customer may buy this weekend, consignment inventory you do not own, anything already listed, anything a regular is walking in to look at. Grading it in-store never takes the comic out of your custody or off the sales floor.
A listing going up tonight, a show on Saturday, a customer at the counter deciding, a collection you are pricing while the seller waits. Capture takes about three minutes and nothing gets shipped, so condition stops being the slow step.
The copies that do justify professional grading are still worth sending. Shooting them first is how you tell which ones those are.
How bulk works
The workflow is the same one an owner uses for one comic. It just holds up when the next forty are sitting next to it.
A phone, decent light, and a flat surface is the whole rig. The app walks whoever is holding it through the same capture set every time, so the newest person on the floor shoots the same book the same way the owner does.
Capture a run of books back to back and let the grades come in behind you. Each finished report arrives with its own public link, short ID, QR code, and downloadable PDF.
The report is a link, an ID, a QR code, and a PDF, so it fits wherever the book is being sold, online or across the counter.
What changes on the floor
Buyers who can see the corners, the spine, and the staples do not need to ask, and are not talking themselves out of the book while they wait for a reply.
Reports use one 10-point scale and one defect vocabulary, so grades do not drift between whoever priced the book and whoever listed it.
Every report keeps the media that produced it. If a sale is questioned later, the condition at the time of sale is documented rather than remembered.
Shoot a candidate, read the grade band and the limiting defect, then decide whether professional encapsulation is worth the fee on that copy.
A dated report sets expectations at intake, in writing, before the book is priced or listed on someone's behalf.
Each graded book has a short ID and a permanent report URL, so condition travels with the book through the case, the show, and the sale.
Volume pricing
We do not publish a volume tier, because the right rate depends on how many raw books you move and how steadily you move them. Tell us what a month looks like and we will come back with a number you can plan against.
What we need from you
Enough to quote you properly, and short enough to send from the shop floor between customers.
What comes back
NuGrade is pre-launch and we are setting up the first shop arrangements now, so early partners help shape how this works.
Talk to us
Send your details and we will come back with a rate for your volume, what onboarding looks like for your staff, and when we can get you shooting. A real reply from a real person, not a drip sequence.
FAQ
You see the report before anyone else does, and nothing is published to a buyer until you attach it. If a copy grades softer than you hoped, that is information you bought for a few dollars instead of discovering it in a return request, and the grade band plus the cited defects still sells the book better than a bare condition word against a skeptical buyer. Nothing obliges you to attach a report to a listing.
The capture flow is built to run in about three minutes for a prepared raw book, and the report comes back after that without anyone waiting on it. In practice a shop batches a stack, keeps shooting, and reads the reports as they arrive.
We quote it rather than publish it. The right rate depends on how many raw books you move and how steadily you move them, and a shelf price for volume would be wrong for most shops in both directions. Tell us roughly what a month looks like for you and we will come back with a rate, what onboarding involves for your staff, and when we can start. One credit grades one book, credits never expire, and there is no subscription.
Staff can run it. The app prompts for each required shot and flags common capture problems before submission, which is the point: the grade should not depend on who was holding the phone.
A public web page: the grade, the tier, the defect findings cited to specific photos or video frames, the submitted media, and the date it was graded. No app install and no account. They can also verify the report ID directly on our site.
No. A report is a point-in-time record and stays live at its own URL. If a book is pressed, cleaned, or damaged later, you create a new dated report rather than editing the old one, so nothing behind a completed sale silently changes.
Yes. Shops use them at intake to document a consigned book's condition before it is priced, and the same report follows the book into the listing.
Answered what you needed? Tell us your volume