Making money as a Scribe

Analysis of the Inscription profession

With Inscription you can: mill herbs for pigments, turn those pigments into inks, and turn inks (along with cheap parchments) into glyphs. There is a huge profit margin when it comes to ink/glyph price difference. It always depends on your server, but there is a niche you can explore almost always. Let's see how we profit with Inscription, shall we? I'll mention a few methods for a Scribe to make money with his profession.

First, you need to do the maths with the values of stuff from your server. You should check the AH for the price of:

*Northrend herbs - These are: Adder's Tongue (with 50% Icy Pigment chance), Icethorn (50% Icy Pigment chance), Lichbloom (usually more expensive due to its Alchemy use), Tiger Lily (25% Icy Pigment chance).
Edit - Quote by Tempfire at JMTC Forum:

"in your post "Making money as a Scribe - Analysis of the Inscription profession" you forgot to mention some of the lesser northrend herbs (which I try to buy all the time while everyone else scrambles for the adder's tongue) ... deadnettle, talandra's rose, fireleaf, and goldclover."

*Ink of the Sea - This is the ink that will give you your threshold (minimum price you will ever sell a glyph for). They are usually no higher than 5g each, but then again, this is server dependant.

*Snowfall Ink - This is obtained from Icy Pigments, which are rare pigments you get from Northrend herbs. Price usually varies from 5g to 30g (again, server dependant).

*Eternal Life - This is used to craft Darkmoon Cards of North. You should only look for the price of this if the Snowfall Ink market is close to dead (this happens on my server). "Darkmoon Card of the North" crafts one card randomly out of 32 possible, 8 from each of the 4 decks (Undeath, Prisms, Chaos or Nobles). It's a matter of luck, because only 1 kind of cards is profittable.

After you check the price of all these items, do the maths and find out which option lets you have the lowest glyph crafting cost (1 or 2 Ink of the Sea + Parchment, but the Parchment prices are neglectable, so focus on ink prices only for less confusion). To do the maths, you should consider: each stack of herbs awards you 6 Inks of the Sea and 1 Snowfall Ink, in average. If Snowfall Inks sell easily and the price of 1 is close to the price of a stack of herbs, you should ALWAYS buy the herbs, because it will allow you to have a very low Ink of the Sea cost. If Snowfall Inks don't sell, you should highly consider 2 options:
**Buying Inks of the Sea directly from the AH if they're at decent prices (What's 'decent', you ask? It's the value which is lower than the majority of the glyphs shown at the AH).
**Buying Eternal Lifes, and craft Darkmoon Cards of the North hoping for Nobles, which are the ones who make you profit a lot. The others usually don't, considering the 3x Eternal Life, 6x Snowfall Ink required.

With all these explanations, what I mean is that you should adapt your business to your server's economy. Always keep that in mind.

After doing all the maths (the longest part is over, yay!), you should find out which glyphs are most popular on your server. You can check a general list (gathered from many servers) of the most popular glyphs on WoWPopular. Note that you should not trust these lists blindly. You will only truly find out your server's demand by trying and succeding/failing.

Then, it's time to start crafting. Bring your (hopefully big) supply of Inks of the Sea to the Ink Trader in Dalaran, and start crafting all the glyphs you intend to sell. After the job is done, send the glyphs to your glyph bank alt. A glyphs-only bank alt with 32-slot Inscription bags is a must if your glyph supply is huge, otherwise you'll have to post your glyphs in a lot of posting sessions (I've got a glyphs-only bank alt, and have to do 2 or 3 posting sessions to be able to post all my glyphs!)

How to post all the glyphs, and for how much?

Personally I use (and love) the addon Quick Auctions. With it, you just have to:

*Decide the minimum price you're willing to sell your glyphs for (usually 2g or 3g above your ink cost, which you get by doing the maths explained above) - This is called your threshold.

*Decide how many of each glyph you post each time (usually 2 or 3 works the best, depending on the demand).

*Decide a fallback price. This is the price you set to your glyphs if no one else is posting a glyph of that kind (you should push the price up as far as you can, but be reasonable because no one will buy a glyph for 200g, for example).

*Decide the undercut value. 1 copper will do, and it will minimise the lowering of prices through heavy undercutting.

This is all very easy to do with the latest version of Quick Auctions, and you'll soon be in love with it like me.

And you're done. Just wait and you'll see your glyphs selling and making you earn a lot of money in no time.

This is it. I hope you find this useful to start doing business as a Scribe!