Sales Charts

Official stats for December are now out from Diamond. Here's the full publisher market share list:

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.

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:

Ron Richards sums up his List of the Worst Things in Comics in 2011 with all the annoying trends and catch phrases of the year -- Marvel's stumbles, the sexism quagmire, Twitter sniping -- but saves for #1 a harsh reality that most of us would rather ignore:

Sometimes it feels like people forget that different comic shops have different sales patterns, what with all the comments on the various industry websites. Challengers Comics + Conversation, a shop in Chicago with one of the higher profiles in that area, has released the top 200 sellers for 2011 in the both the monthly issues and graphic novel categories.

By Paul Mellerick

The one-two-three of Buffy, Walking Dead and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continues to dominate the top of the indie chart, but Boom’s new Peanuts comics, containing new strips not by Schulz, gets the number four spot. Other than that it’s a quiet month, although there are 21 debut series, specials and one-shots across the list.

Now into month three of the New DC, overall it appears that the much vaunted extra sales that were rumoured are just that, rumours. Most books are still firmly on a downward heading, with many titles at the lowest sales in their history, and those that are stable have a history of being stable. A lot of this month’s new books have started well, but none have unusually high sales, bar maybe the first part of Kiss vs Archie.

123 indie books charted this month, only 4 less than 2 months ago, but with the bottom book selling almost a thousand copies more, 4,330 to 3,341. This seems largely due to new books, with 22 debut comics on the chart this month. The bottom book sold 4,330 compared to last month’s 5,167, but there were only 87 indie titles last month, and this month’s number 87 sold 6,299. In total those books sold approximately 1,099,699, up on last month’s 921,878, but this month’s top 87 sold 915,559, so like for like sales are pretty close. Still, average sales are 8,940 per book, down from last month’s 10,596. As usual, UK and European sales from Diamond UK are not reported in this chart.

by Mark-Oliver Frisch -- Three months into the wholesale makeover of DC's line of superhero comic books, the direct-market numbers suggest three main things: One, the "New 52" relaunch was extremely successful at mobilizing comics specialty retailers; two, this success doesn't seem to be affecting, for good or ill, any other comics beyond the initial 52 titles; and three, the number of new comics readers the "New 52" has brought into comics stores seems negligible, overall. Retailers continued to adjust their orders for the "New 52" titles in November, and this time, the downward correction was more noticeable. On average, sales of new DC comic books dropped by nearly 10,000 units or 19.2% in November, versus 10.4% in October. The average drop on the third issues of the 52 new superhero titles was 18.8%, versus 5.2% for the second issues. Animal Man (-8.0%) and Detective Comics (-9.7%) were the "New 52" books with the smallest drops in November, while Blackhawks (-29.5%), Mister Terrific (-29.7%), Blue Beetle (-29.9%) and Captain Atom (-30.0%) were at the tail end of the spectrum. In contrast to October, when all but one of the "New 52" debut issues made the chart again with significant re-orders, only two of the #3 issues -- namely Batman and Aquaman -- charted again in November. On balance, the drop-off on those titles is still better than average. The fact that the larger drop came in November and the lack of more #2 re-orders both suggest that customer interest in the "New 52" peaked early, however.

With FEAR ITSELF wrapping up, Marvel had several major releases in November - the POINT ONE one-shot, the relaunches of UNCANNY X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR, and the first issue of new ongoing title AVENGING SPIDER-MAN.

We've also got the epilogue of FEAR ITSELF, the start of BATTLE SCARS, and a bunch of other "Regenesis" tie-ins from the X-books.

Marvel found itself behind DC for the third straight month in November, though the gap is growing closer. DC led by 40% to 38% in unit share, and 35% to 33% in dollars. And of course, it should be remembered that DC's extra sales don't appear to have come at Marvel's expense; if DC's relaunch has brought any new or lapsed readers into the market, then in theory, that's good for other publishers too - it brings them into everyone's potential market.

Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

5. POINT ONE
11/11  One-shot - 113,352

Marvel's top selling comic of the month! Or is it? This book was massively overshipped, with retailers receiving twice the number of copies they'd actually ordered, at no extra cost. Those copies are presumably included in this number - that certainly appears to be Diamond's standard practice, given the odd sales spikes that we've seen when this strategy has been used before.

If that's the case, then the actual orders of this book would be 56,676 - which would have placed the book at number 29 between AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and AVENGERS. Considering the solicitation ("You CANNOT miss this. Catch a tease of the biggest change to the Marvel Universe in over 35 years!") that number would surely have been disappointing, even allowing for the six dollar price tag. The wisdom of pricing a teaser book that high must also be open to question.

Some online sales data for 12/25 and 12/26 from IBM, a Top Ten list from Amazon's Kindle graphic novel page, and a surprising discovery! Read on!

Comics Alliance has run this amazing infographic by Tim Leong, based on the year's NY Times graphic novel bestsellers. This is a topic ripe for study since it has contained many many surprises -- like appearances by DAVID B. on the list? Awesome sauce. What is not a surprise is that WALKING DEAD and SCOTT PILGRIM have dominated the charts for most of 18 months. The future of comics is masterful, multi-volume media tie-ins that speak to contemporary life, it seems.

Here is a listing of the current comics bestsellers on BN.com, scanned at 11:20 AM this Tuesday, December 20, 2011.

Marc-Oliver can tell you how the actual sales levels of the DC relaunch are, but let's take a look at a slightly different metric: how do the relative popularity of the "New 52" compare to the way that retailers initially ordered them? With November's sales estimates, we see orders where the retailers had a chance to see how the #1's moved and potentially the #2's in some cases, before the cutoff dates for adjusting orders.