For instance, in April 2009, Baker & Taylor sold 12,791 paperback graphic novels into the library market. The top 15 titles averaged 511 copies each and the leading category for these top 15 books (with 5 ISBNs) was Juvenile Fiction/Manga. That probably won’t come as a surprise to a lot of people.

On the hardcover side, Baker & Taylor sold 1274 graphic novels into the library market, with the top 15 averaging 60 copies each. The most popular category for the top 15 books (with 4 ISBNs) was Superheroes, filed under adult.

Jamie told me that the paperbacks skew towards the juvenile fiction section and the hardcovers skew towards adult. As you can see from the above, the paperback market dominates in drastic fashion with hardcovers only achieving 10% of paperback sales in April. Upon consideration, a certain logic would account for this. Who puts out the most hardcover graphic novels on a regular basis? Marvel. DC will occasionally pop in with an original graphic novel or an Absolute edition, but Marvel’s tendency to follow a traditional publisher’s hardcover/ paperback rotation could account for the superhero dominance in hardcovers.

i work for a news agency that distributes trades , etc
to many types of stores
even Borders and B&N use us for restocks

we use an unique barcode for all items
so when a store scans our items
they can figure the distribution source for the book
Bookscan does NOT recognize our barcode in their system
the customers recipt will read right
but it will have a small * or something similar
bookscan treats our sale as a General Book purchase

also i think everyone on here would be surprised how many grocery stores , drug stores , toy stores , newsstand , Targets , Wall-Marts, etc add up.

stores may only sell one’s and two’s of a book
but you multiply this by X 1,000’s of stores
this quickly adds up to quite a bit
of unreported sales
add in our unreported sales in book stores

and our medium size Mid-Atlantic News Agency
may end up selling 3,000+ pcs of a title that are never reported

Scholastic Bone is sold in the kid’s department at B&N. Everything else Bone is sold in Graphic Novels. Sold by Scholastic, which is the largest publisher of children’s books in the U.S. They have bookstore accounts, DM accounts, libraries, book clubs, and book fairs. Yes, there are older fans buying these books (I buy the hardcovers) but these older fans are also reading and gifting these books to children.

As for what Brian Hibbs say, I compare it what I see and know. The sky is falling? How fast? How big are the chunks? Or is just a meteor shower?

Marvel has a great brand, but the only superhero titles that sell are the licensed titles from other publishers. (DK, Chronicle) Which suggests that Marvel needs to market their books better to bookstores. They have a great selection of Iron Man titles this summer, yet I doubt they will come near DC’s Dark Knight success. (Take a look at the NY Times BS GN lists. Compare Marvel to DC to everyone else.)

A few thoughts:

1) Bookscan tracks actual sales by retailers to individual consumer customers. The publisher’s statement to PW seems unclear to me as to what they mean by “sales.” They might be talking about the number of copies the publisher sold into their various book retailer/wholesaler customers, which isn’t the same thing as sales to end consumers.

2) Bookscan doesn’t track sales made in the direct sales comics market, but it also doesn’t track sales made directly to libraries or schools, or sales in Wal-Mart, nor sales to Christian bookstores / church markets, or sales made in export markets. (I don’t imagine that Wal-Mart would be a big factor for this book, but I can imagine that libraries, religious booksellers, and export sales might combine to be non-trivial for this one.)

That’s no so obvious, Rich. The more adult manga (do note that I’m not talking about porn or anything, just manga done for adult audiences) sells a very small fraction of the teen stuff. Look for the examples on Hibbs’ list.

The same problem happens in France, where manga has been on the mainstream for much longer than on the US, so it’s not so easy. Remembr that on Japan itself the manga boom happened on the late 40s/early 50s, but it took over 20 years for adult manga to get established.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

as for Bone selling big because of kids….I think that’s wrong. if anything, the (old) fanboys love Bone as much as anything I’ve ever seen. Sure, some may be buying it for their kids and library collections, etc., but for the most part, it’s still adults who love that series.

The long tail is also about something new perking interest in an old product/back list. The classic example from the original article was two books on mountain climbing – “Touching the Void” became popular and caused people to find the older “Into Thin Air.” Part of this was facilitated through Amazon’s “Customers who bought this, also bought:” feature.

So a pure long tail play would be people seeing Watchmen the movie (or hearing about it) and picking up Watchmen the comic, V for Vendetta, LOEG, etc.

I also specifically say:

“It might also be worth underlining that the “Long Tail” is roughly the same size as the best-selling 750 titles – those best-selling 750 titles sell about as many copies and dollars as the 18,942 items below them.”

It takes me 6 weeks to arrange, analyze, and report on what I’m doing as it is — to write anything meaningful about individual books selling under about ~3900 copies is not something that I’m likely to do, except in certain highly specific cases, not without a massive massive pay raise at least! I make under $5/hr writing the BookScan reports!

By limiting it to the Top 750, I am reporting on “the Top Half” of the market — and I’m providing gross Long Tail performance of ANY publisher placing 5 or more titles in the Top 750. That’s about the limit of what I’m capable of doing, sorry.

-B

In this piece, Hibbs writes:

“Also of major note is that for 2007 to 2009, I have the full and entire BookScan listing, down to books that have only one copy sold YTD. However, I’m not going to provide that entire list because that’s too much data, even for a data-junkie like myself. I’ve cut the list off at 750 items because that’s what we’ve reported in the previous six years. Still, I have the deeper data, and I’ll summarize it as we go along.”

So, apparently, he does have the more complete list–at least for recent years–but has just decided to present raw data for the top 750. Which is certainly an arbitrary cut-off point, but anywhere he choses to cut it off is going to be an arbitrary place. It’d be nice to see the rest of the data, I admit, absolutely. (And, as Heidi observes, this whole thing is technically a leak, so I can understand his not wanting to tempt fate by posting the entire list he’s acquired.)

Even if he doesn’t provide the raw data for the on-past-the-top-750 titles, Hibbs at least seems to try to address the notion of the rest of the list in his various “Long Tail” observations throughout the piece.