Sales Charts: Diamond releases complete January 2012 charts and publisher market share
Here's Diamond complete market share charts for January, show Marvel and DC splitting the dollars and units. And here are links to all of the sales charts released for the month. As a reminder, am Indie publisher is a non-premiere publisher— so any company but DH, DC, IDW, IMAGE, or MARVEL. A "Small Press" publisher is one outside the top-10 bestselling publishers over the previous six months.
Continue ReadingSo just how many digital comics did DC sell in January?
Have you been wondering what digital comics DC has been selling the most of? While you can do a running snapshot of iTunes' "in app Sales" it doesn't give you a month's total. But, as they did last month, DC has just released their Top Ten digital comics for January to CBR. And it goes like this:
Continue ReadingJanuary Top 100 Sales Guesstimates — Not Looking Good For Marvel
Diamond has posted the top 100 sellers for January 2012. I've taken their index and plugged in 31,496 for the sales of Walking Dead and calculated sales guesstimates for the rest of the titles based on Diamond's index where 100 = the sales of the current issue of Batman. Where did I get that number? That was December's estimated sales for Walking Dead and for the last 6 months, The Walking Dead has fluctuated 1.5% or less from month to month. It's a shockingly consistent book of late, but if the real estimates of Walking Dead fluctuated in January, then these guesstimates are going to be further off. Since that number puts Batman #5 at 130,095 copies and the real estimate from ICV2 for Batman #4 was 133,781, I'm thinking these guesstimates are more likely to be high than low... which would bode ill for Marvel. As it is, I've only got them with two issues (of one title) breaking the 60K barrier.
Continue ReadingDC tops units; Marvel, dollars in January [update]
DC had the #1 comic for the sixth month in a row, with JUSTICE LEAGUE #5 topping the comics sales chart, according to Diamond's just-released figures for January. They beat Marvel 39.86% to 37.51%. However, Marvel eked out a slim lead in the dollars chart, 35.17% to 33.55%, while in Unit Share DCE edged Marvel. However, DC held all top ten spots.
Continue ReadingIndie Month-to-Month Sales — December 2011
By Paul Mellerick -- Walking Dead, Buffy and TMNT again dominate, but a rare appearance of Aspen’s Lady Mechanika is the third best-selling indie book this month. Dark Horse and Dynamite have a couple of promising launches, but apart from them it’s mostly downhill for the rest of the chart. If you ever wanted an indie charts drinking game, try taking a shot everytime I say drop or dropping, you’ll be smashed before you’re halfway through. 126 indie books charted this month, slightly up on last month with less Marvel or DC books charting this month. The bottom book sold 3,105, way lower than last month’s 4,330. In total those books sold approximately 1,067,927, a bit down from last month’s 1,099,699 with more titles. Average sales are 8,475 per book, down from last month’s 8,940. As usual, UK and European sales from Diamond UK are not reported in this chart.
Continue ReadingDC Month-to-Month Sales: December 2011
Sales of the "New 52" books show no sign of stabilization, four issues into DC's big relaunch. The average "New 52" title dropped by 17.4% in December, versus 19.6% in November and 5.2% in October. The only "New 52" titles with single-digit drops in December are Aquaman (6.0%), Teen Titans (9.6%) and Batman: The Dark Knight (9.7%). The three "New 52" titles with the biggest fourth-issue drops are Static Shock (28.2%), Mister Terrific (29.0%) and Men of War (30.0%). Overall, there are 18 "New 52" titles with drops in excess of 20% in December, down from 22 in November. The lack of re-orders on the chart also suggests that the sheen is off the "New 52." Whereas 51 of the debut issues made the chart again in October, only two of the second issues charted again in November. In December, none of the third issues made the chart again. The average drop-off in first-month sales since issue #1 for the "New 52" books is 36.4%, as of December. The three titles with the smallest overall drop-off are Animal Man (7.4%), Detective Comics (13.5%) and Nightwing (17.6%). The three titles with the largest overall drop-off are Blackhawks (58.0%), Mister Terrific (56.7%) and Men of War (55.6%). Only 7 of the "New 52" titles display an overall drop-off of less than 20%, while 9 of them have already lost more than 50% of their debut first-month sales.
Continue ReadingMarvel Month-to-Month Sales December 2011
by Paul O'Brien -- This month, the slow build to AVENGERS VS X-MEN begins with the AVENGERS: X-SANCTION miniseries; and DEFENDERS is relaunched. Both are wisely given a pretty clear run, without other Marvel launches competing for space. Elsewhere, the X-Men, Hulk and Fantastic Four relaunches continue to bed down. And down at the bottom end of the chart, the cancellations continue to mount up. Normal service is resumed, kind of, as Marvel had the largest share of the north American direct market, albeit by a fairly narrow margin - 39% to 38% in units, 34.4% to 33.7% in dollars. But bear in mind, this was a five-week month where DC more or less sat out week five.
Continue ReadingSales Charts: Barnes & Noble Graphic Novel Bestsellers
A snapshot of graphic novels bestsellers from BarnesAndNoble.com, taken at 3 PM, Monday, January 15, 2012.
Continue ReadingThe Surprising State of Marvel Graphic Novels and the Diamond 2011 List
Over at Publisher's Weekly, I was writing about how Marvel has trouble keeping their books in print and had some retailers tell me how Marvel's sales suffer for it. Now with Diamond's 2011 year-end sales charts coming out, WOW, do things look odd.
Continue ReadingSales Charts: Why Diamond classifies Random House as a “Small” publisher
Courtesy of Diamond, we've been posting their top sales charts for 2011 today (more are coming) -- but one question keeps coming up. Diamond releases charts for both "Indie" publishers and "Small" publishers. What is the difference? When you see Random House -- the world's biggest publisher -- on Diamond's "Small" chart, it seems paradoxical. Well, Diamond has provided us with some definitions.
Continue ReadingMarvel won 2011; JL #1 and WALKING DEAD topped charts
Diamond has released its year-end figures for 2011 and Marvel eked out a win over DC despite the New 52 surge at the end of the year. Image was #3, with Dark Horse and IDW in a near-dead heat for #4 and #5. Dynamite was a clear #6 Although we'll be posting the entire list in a page view. Diamond also released the top ten comics and GNs. DC won nine of the top comics spots, despite one Marvel appearance for the "Death of Ultimate Spider-Man" issue. In the graphic novels, WALKING DEAD ruled the roost, although, predictably, Batman and Alan Moore made an appearance. Less predictably, so did Nick Spencer's MORNING GLORIES collection.
Continue ReadingDecember 2011 Diamond Sales Estimates: Notable and Surprises
ICV2 has their December 2011 Diamond sales estimates up and the downward correction would appear to be continuing. The big debating point here would be DC returnability. IIRC, Diamond's been adjusting the numbers to allow for returns (10%?), but relatively few people believe that retailers are returning that much, when taken across the industry. So anything returnable is probably a little under-reported.
Continue ReadingOfficial Diamond Sales Charts for December 2011
Official stats for December are now out from Diamond. Here's the full publisher market share list:
Continue ReadingMarvel beats DC market share by a hair in December
Diamond's initial December figures are out, and Marvel eked out a 1 point lead over DC in dollars and a 2 point lead in units in December -- but they did it the hard way with a ground war fought one ship week at a time -- DC basically sat out the fifth week and Marvel went for it. Of course they are also double shipping and so on. This is the war of the trenches. Elsewhere, comics were up a tetch for the year, with GNs down 5% in dollars. And GNs have just had a massive slide -- down 10%in units for the year. This seems to be one of the underreported sales stories of the year for us. In the department of no surprise, JL was the best selling comic and WALKING DEAD the best selling GN.
Continue ReadingSales charts: glass half full of numbers!
Our wish for actual sales number released by an actual comics publisher were finally granted! And in The Hollywood Reporter, no less. DC released sales for its top three books of the year:
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