By John Jackson Miller on 2/28/2008 4:59 PM

Continuing wit the topic below of Nielsen's Bookscan and its sales charts, an interesting post just up about its sister Soundscan top-seller lists -- and how they set it up so that backlist items wouldn't creep back up into the top-seller lists.

As this is a case of them publishing sales rankings in actual practice, we might wonder whether they would bring a similar approach to comics, separating frontlist from backlist. On the Diamond charts, the monthly sales for the Golden Oldies do make the list with everything else, when they earn the spots.

By John Jackson Miller on 2/27/2008 7:15 PM

In a post about the publication of sales figures on Heidi MacDonald's blog, she brought up a number of ways that they do matter, above and beyond serving as water-cooler (really web) discussion fodder for fans. It recalled to me one of the reasons I thought it would be interesting to include them in the Standard Catalogs a few years back, integrated within the price guide listings. One benefit infrequently mentioned applies directly to the comics-as-collectible crowd: As supply levels have become better known, speculator frenzies like we saw in the black-and-white boom and in the early 1990s may have become less likely — or at least, better informed by reality.

I stress “may.” I’d like to think that the one customer who famously had his retailer order 5,000 copies of the “adjectiveless” X-Men #1 in 1991 would have been deterred, had he known that there were 7-8 million more copies out there, but maybe nothing would have stopped him. (I doubt he would have put his money into 5,000 different comic books, in any event.) But bubble markets tend to harm even those who don’t participate in them — as many retailers from the last crash can attest — so I have to think that having information out there is a good thing for everyone. Fewer people burnt is fewer people burnt out — and less collateral damage, we would hope.

Today, much of the immediate-aftermarket attention in new comics is now confined to the limited edition variant market, differently from the early 1990s — possibly just because buyers better know (especially from eBay) how many of the "regular versions" exist with relation to observable demand. There may be some safety for the industry in that, as the collectible new comics tail is less likely to wag the entire new-comics canine. In 1991-3, it did!

By John Jackson Miller on 2/23/2008 11:40 AM

As noted below, my new cross-time comparison column is on Newsarama — but for our site's regulars, the data is here as always:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
January 2008: 7.18 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: +7%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +28%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +3%

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES
January 2008: $22.33 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +7%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +44%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +34%

TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
January 2008: $4.67 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +17%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +132%

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
January 2008: $27.00 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +9%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +54%

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
January 2008: $36.7 million ($39.8 million with UK)
Versus 1 year ago this month: +9%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +75%

Click to see the January monthly tables, with some new market share calculations formerly seen in Comics & Games Retailer.

It was more esoteric than I wanted to address in the Newsarama piece — especially since I couldn't prove an alternate case — but several observers and I noted some strangeness in the Diamond indexed reports for the month. In a nutshell, the index numbers cluster very closely to publisher internal reports for the Week 1 shipping products — becoming roughly 2% too high for each successive shipping week. Then there are a couple of items in the list that did not ship in January at all, but in the first week of February. My theory is that somehow the public chart and the publisher charts do not reflect the same exact grouping of ordering days: if, say, some February reorder activity entered the January chart, that would explain a lot (but not all) of the variance. The Week 1 numbers were solid, so I went with that for the Order Index figure — but, as always, my report ... Read More »

Comments (3)

The ComiChron

By John Jackson Miller on 2/21/2008 2:03 PM

The January 2008 report is online here, and I am pleased to announce my new column appearing on Newsarama. Click here to read the January 2008 Comichron Report.

More details here soon — enjoy!

By John Jackson Miller on 2/19/2008 10:04 PM

In answer to the call for graphics depicting sales trends over time, there are now pages for

Market Shares

Recent Comics Shop Orders (updated monthly)

Comics Shop Orders (across the entire data set)

The January report is coming soon. Be sure to check back!