THE first coin that captured D. Brent Pogue’s attention was a 1915 wheat penny. He was 10 years old, and at the time, he thought it was worth $250 million.

“The only value of that coin is my sentimental attachment to it,” Mr. Pogue said from his home in Dallas. He estimated the penny is probably worth 2 cents today.

But he went on to buy far rarer coins, including the only 1822 Half Eagle gold piece in private hands, in a 40-year quest to build the pre-eminent collection of early American coins. “I fell in love with the history of our country, the history of our coins, the artistic beauty of our coins,” he said.

Mr. Pogue, 50, has decided to sell his collection of some 680 coins, which the specialty auction house Stack’s Bowers Galleries estimates could fetch more than $200 million. Not bad for pocket change with a face value of $769.14, according to Brian Kendrella, president of Stack’s Bowers.

Mr. Pogue has a particularly rich collection of coins with a built-in audience of coin enthusiasts. Even so, strategy is the key to getting the most from the sale of a collection. That is why Stack’s Bowers has spaced out the coin sales over seven auctions in the next three years. The first was last week.

And while it is a heady time in the art and auction world — Christie’s recently set a record by selling more than $1 billion of postwar and contemporary art in one week — such headline-grabbing numbers make selling art seem easy.

In most cases, selling a collection will take years and result in many unsold pieces. To prevent disappointment — or worse, many unsold lots — sellers need to ask tough questions of the auction houses or galleries that want to represent them, and be reasonable about the value of what they have amassed.

The first thing someone wanting to sell a collection needs is a story to hold it together. “Many people can put together groups of things that are called collections,” said Jonathan Rendell, a deputy chairman of Christie’s. “But a really great collection is completely bound together. The objects and the collector are one thing.”

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Mr. Rendell said he worked on the sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, in 2009. “You’ve got the glamour of the fashion world and also two very serious collectors who were on point,” he said. “They didn’t buy anything that wasn’t top of the line.”

The Saint Laurent sale, like the ones for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the actress Elizabeth Taylor and the designer Bill Blass, had a rare aura.

Ricki Harris, regional representative in Chicago for Bonhams, an auction house, said she remembered coming upon the archaeological collection of Leighton A. Wilkie, who owned a tool and die company in Illinois. His family, she said, cared little for his collection, which included an Egyptian sarcophagus.

“He had begun putting together a great research library,” Ms. Harris said of Mr. Wilkie, who died in 1993. “He had antiquities from Egypt in his collection because he had funded digs of the pyramids, and Egypt offered him the opportunity to buy things. We told a story around this and did incredibly well with the rest of the property.”

For most collections, though, not every piece is wonderful, and a strategy is needed to sell as many as possible.

Mr. Pogue’s coins vary in quality and auction value. The first auction, on May 19, conducted in partnership with Sotheby’s, brought in $25 million, which beat the auction house’s high estimate by $1 million.

A 1796 quarter dollar sold for $1,527,500, which tied a record, and an 1808 Quarter Eagle sold for $2,350,000, setting a record for any quarter eagle sold and for any 19th-century gold coin.

And many coveted coins are to come, including Mr. Pogue’s 1822 Half Eagle, which his father, a real estate investor, bought for him in 1982 when he was 17. It cost $687,500 then, and Mr. Kendrella said it could top $10 million when it is offered at the fifth sale next year. (The Smithsonian Museum has the two other remaining 1822 Half Eagles.)

These are the types of coins that Mr. Kendrella is using to structure the seven auctions so that each one generates roughly $30 million in sales. But he said he also wanted to make sure that the rarest coins were not in the same sale, like the two 1804 dollars that are estimated to fetch $5 million and $10 million.

For the seller of something that is not an internationally known work of art, like the Picasso that sold for $179.4 million at Christie’s, finding an expert who understands the particulars of the piece is essential.

In an earlier instance, Sotheby’s worked with Guyette & Schmidt, a regional auction house in Maryland now called Guyette & Deeter, to sell a major collection of duck decoys. “People went crazy for it,” said Ronald Varney, principal of Ronald Varney Fine Art Advisors, who was then at Sotheby’s. “Sotheby’s did the promotion, and the specialty auction house knew where all the duck decoy buyers were.”

Some $11 million in duck decoys were sold at that auction in January 2000.

Mr. Varney says he now works to educate the same sellers he once chased at Sotheby’s about their options. “If you’re selling a collection, it’s something you want to approach with great care and caution,” he said. “The art market is not like the financial market. We don’t have the S.E.C. It’s unregulated.”

He said he recommended that people ask specific questions about what kind of advertising an auction house is doing for them and push it to create a specialized catalog and other supporting material, like monographs that are written for big sales. He also recommends that people with significant pieces ask the houses to make commitment to selling some of the lesser items being offered.

In some cases, galleries may be a better route, particularly when a collector has artists who are significant but not well known in the big auctions.

“If you’re talking about Impressionist and modern art, the market absorbed over $2 billion in a couple of weeks,” said Jim Carona, owner of Heather James Fine Art, which sells collections at its galleries in Palm Desert, Calif., and Jackson, Wyo. “But if you’re selling an esoteric group of works of art, you have a thin market. If it’s a regional market, then you have another set of challenges.”

Regional galleries, he said, have an advantage in being specialized and knowing all the buyers for a less-followed art form — like duck decoys.

Or a collection could contain the minor works by major artists and benefit from more attention or a slower pace of sales. Kristine Bell, senior partner at the David Zwirner Gallery, is handling the sale of 150 drawings by artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Brice Marden owned by Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky.

“The auction market is very repetitive,” Ms. Bell said. “It’s the same brands and names that sell well over time. But there are well-known artists who are nurtured by the private gallery market.”

And she said that by taking more time to sell a collection, a gallery can tell the story of the collector to turn it into a great marketing hook.

Private sales also protect sellers from the risk that their piece will go unsold at auction, making it difficult to sell that piece publicly for years. It is also better for sellers at auction to take a lower price than the house had estimated, since they probably paid much less for the piece five or 10 years earlier.

Mr. Pogue declined to discuss the profit he will make on his collection, saying instead that it was time for him to move on to other hobbies.

“I know the collection is going to bring enough money for my family,” he said. “But I am not consumed by the sum total of these seven sales. I know they’re going to bring more than what we bought them for, and that’s good enough for me.”

Selling Private Collection of Artifacts Requires Special Care - The New York Times