Tag: Sales Charts

Lots of new entries this month, including smash-hit new books from Robert Kirkman and Kieron Gillen and a first ever official comic for a cult film favourite. Elsewhere Valiant continue to falter despite the new Armor Hunters crossover, and Zenescope seem to be similarly slipping down and off the sales chart with their numbers dropping to new lows.

This is a pretty standard month. Overall, comics sales were strong this month, and while many ongoing Marvel books followed standard attrition rates, they made up for those losses with several anniversary specials and new debuts that posted strong numbers. The big brand to follow is Guardians of the Galaxy which launches several new spin-off series this month to capitalize on the movie release. Let’s look at a breakdown of this month’s Marvel books.

The comics industry in North America moved into positive territory for 2014 with a record-setting month of July, according to Comichron's analysis of data released by Diamond Comic Distributors. Click to see the sales estimates for comics ordered in July 2014.  A much larger number of new comic book and graphic novel releases for the month helped July's sales to set a number ofrecords for the Diamond Exclusive Era, which began in April 1997:

Okay I stand corrected. When I saw the double digit rises in sales for July 2014 vs July 2013 I assumed it had to...

In yesterday's comments on the Mike Dawson Mid-career assessment, retailer Brian Hibbs stepped in with some comments, including this one

Change is coming! As I researched and wrote this month’s article in the week before Comic Con, Marvel made several huge announcements. Mjolnir will now be wielded by a woman in a new Thor series. The Falcon will wield the shield in a new Captain America. The Avengers will see major Roster changes in Avengers Now.

Now if you’ve been following these sales articles, none of this should have surprised you. Sure the details are exciting and interesting, but we’ve known for a while now that sales on the Avengers books and the big 3 marvel heroes (Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor) have gotten stale. It was time for a change, what is exciting about these announcements is that these aren’t small changes but big changes that garnered national media attention and hopefully will mean big (and hopefully lasting) sales boosts. Let’s look at the numbers for this month.

As there will be no industry white paper at San Diego, where Milton Griepp traditionally releases his industry sales figures for the year, he and John Jackson Miller has teamed up for an estimate of the size of the comics market in 2013: $870 million. That's up $135 million from 2012 -- a very sizable increase. With sales this year generally flat it probably won't be a big increase unless something really nutty happens, but that shows that it wasn't just your imagination: 2013 was a pretty swell year for the comics.

The full estimates for June 2014 comics sales are now online, and as reported last weekend, at "halftime" we see a market that has rebounded from winter to bring this year's sales even with last year. Retailers spent almost the exact same amount of money on comics and graphic novels in the period in the first halves of this year and last year, but this year they bought slightly more graphic novels and slightly fewer comic books. But the losses in comic books mainly came during the winter; they've perked up since. We were down 4% in overall sales in the first quarter and up 4% in the second. (So there's no "comics recession," at least in the two-negative-quarters definition of the term.

OUTCAST #1, the new book by Robert Kirkman and Paul Azaceta has been a huge success, we're told with orders surpassing The Walking Dead...

Sales Charts! You love them, I love them, and here's one I haven't linked to before. Publishers Weekly (my other job) is running category best sellers lists for Apple's iBooks portal and here's the line for the last week of June. I'm pubbing the whole list this time just to get you sale chart analysts ginned up, but in the future a link will do. Note these books are iBooks format and not via Comixology.

Original Sin is Marvel’s big new event and it debuted at 147k and then dropped down to 92k. But is that good for a major event book? For fun I pulled the numbers for #1 issues of the last several big event books from Marvel to see how Original Sin stacks up. As you can see out of these 7 books it ranks 5th. I did better than Siege and Fear Itself, but worse than Age of Ultron, AVX, Secret invasion or Civil War. Two other interesting trends to note is that events have become more frequent and sell worse. I cherry picked these events because they fell around the same time of year as Original Sin and were Avengers-focused, but the last few years have been very event heavy and sales have been dropping overall on these events. They are still the best-selling books of their month generally but Marvel has yet to recapture the excitement and sales of Civil War.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. DC take five of the top ten spots on the Diamond sales charts, and after taking a shellacking on market share last month pull up nearly even to their Marvelous Competition, though in a month where the market was down from the previous year. There are some good things to point to: DC's strategy of canceling their low-selling ongoing DCU titles and replacing them with weekly titles is working, at least so far. With the exception of last September's anomalous 3D cover month, May 2014 is the best average sales for the DCU line since in nearly two years, since June 2012. Most importantly, Batman Eternal and Futures End give them several comics in the 50-75K range, an area in which they have been sorely lacking as of late. Mind you this isn't a long-term strategy, but it keeps the bears at bay for a few more months until the Next Big Event or line-wide gimmick comes along.