Sales Charts

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.

A snapshot of graphic novels bestsellers from BarnesAndNoble.com, taken at 3 PM, Monday, January 15, 2012.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.