How To

Hot Books

Nothing about a comic changes in its bag; what changes is the conversation around it. A casting announcement, a trailer, a creator's passing, and a book that was worth forty dollars on Tuesday is worth a multiple of that by Thursday. Hot Books exists so you hear about it before the buyer does.

The daily sweep

Every morning at 8:00 AM Eastern, the system sweeps a curated list of comic industry outlets, groups the stories that are really the same story, and maps each one to the key issues it actually affects. You get headline, outlet, and link: the news as pointers to be read, not article text reproduced. And when a listed book deserves a deeper look, press and hold it: your phone's web search comes up with the book already in it, so checking what the wider internet says about that issue is one gesture, not a round of typing.

Matched against your boxes

Then the part that matters: the feed is matched against the books you own, so the screen answers two questions at once. What just got hot that I already have, and what just got hot that I should be hunting. Items new since you last looked are badged, so the morning check takes a minute, not a scroll.

When the hot book is yours

Some mornings the badge lands on your own box, and that is the moment to check your asking prices before the market does. If the book is marked for sale or sitting on your kiosk, a price set last week may be stale news: a new movie-character announcement can mean your book should sell for five times what it would have ten minutes ago, and the ten minutes matter.

The sweep-now button

The morning sweep is not the only one. If news breaks mid-day, any user can pay a few credits to run a fresh sweep on demand. The Sweeper sees the results first; a few minutes later they belong to everybody, collected free by bringing up the screen or tapping refresh. The app is fair about it: if somebody else already swept the outlets a few minutes earlier, it tells you so and does not charge you for news that is already on the screen.

So there are two ways to play it. There is a certain thrill in being the Sweeper: first eyes on the news, first to spot the hot book, maybe first to quietly corner the market on the same hot issues before anyone else has heard. And there is nothing wrong with riding coattails, because the same information reaches you a few minutes later for nothing.

Why the matching happens on your phone

The news feed is the same for everyone. The matching against your collection runs on your device, against the inventory that lives there, so nobody, us included, ever learns what is in your boxes. That is also why it is fast and free: it is just your own inventory answering. Hot Books is the complement to the price estimates, which are built from historical market data: the estimate knows what a book has been worth, and Hot Books tells you when this morning changed that.

See it in real life: The morning check follows one sweep from a headline to the right key issues, including the first live morning where it mapped real news correctly on the first try.