By John Jackson Miller on 6/27/2007 12:00 AM

David Beard has an interesting article in the latest Comics Journal (#283) on distributor sales charts -- and whether the reporting of them distorts their importance. It's in stores now, and worth checking out. My thoughts (from my own discussions with David) are here.

By John Jackson Miller on 5/3/2007 12:00 AM

 

I'm still working my way through getting more year-by-year data online, but there have been enough media requests in advance of Spider-Man 3 that I figured I'd go ahead and add one of the title pages that I intend to do, showing sales accoring to the Statements of Ownership across time.

Click for Amazing Spider-Man sales figures from the beginning in the 1960s to 2006. (Or, rather, 2005, as Marvel seems not to have run a form in it for the end of 2006, near as I can figure. If someone has one, drop me a line in the Forum. Marvel did run forms in some other titles for the year, just not this one, or so it seems.)

I'll do more of these title pages, linking from the year-by-year pages, in the future -- hopefully there will be enough for their own section at some point.

By John Jackson Miller on 5/2/2007 12:00 AM

With Spider-Man 3 approaching fast, I have gotten a number of requests for yearly aggregate data in chart form. For quick reference, I've added the following to the main Yearly Reports page:

• Overall Market Dollars (estimated range)
• Overall Diamond Comics, Trade Paperback, and Magazine Sales
• And for each of the 12 months of each year:
• Unit Sales for Diamond's Top 300 Monthly Comics from each month of the year (hence, 3,600 comics)
• Dollar Sales for Diamond's Top 300 Comics
• Dollar Sales for Diamond's Top Trade Paperbacks from each month (number varies depending on Diamond's reportage)
• Combined Dollar Sales for Diamond's Reported Top-Selling Comics and Trade Paperbacks

Additionally, there are annual averages for each year for prices of comics sold by Diamond, both raw and weighted by orders.

The component monthly lists for this material are all on my repository on CBGXtra -- the links are here -- and there's additional annual information elsewhere on the site here, such as my back-of-the-envelope guesses at annual circulation from before 1996.

By John Jackson Miller on 4/24/2007 12:00 AM

And I now have the Top 300 Comics sales estimates and the aggregate sales figures for March 2007 online here. My analysis article, along with the trade paperback data, is here on CBGXtra.

A note about this data and timing, as my reports will be handled a little differently than others you may see (and, indeed, differently from what I used to do when I worked for F+W). Diamond releases not only its Top 300 listings, but market share data and other keys from which observers can estimate the size of the market.

With the Diamond orders of few comic books alone, anyone can calculate a reasonably accurate estimate of sales figures these days. (It was different before they went to Final Order reports — the variances were much higher — but today, most estimates out there hew pretty close to one another. In the case of my reports, I take an additional step. As you might expect, Diamond generates a complete record of what it sells each month for the major publishers — right down to single copies of trade paperbacks on the Star System — and that information, when applied to the market shares, generates the Overall calculations I've been doing for five years on CBGXtra.

Since the timing of that raw information doesn't always synch up with the release of the sales charts, the release of my analysis will vary from month to month, depending on what information has been disseminated. In some months, everything's available and there's very little lag time. Other times, there might be either because of the data being unavailable or scheduling conflicts on my part.

So begin checking The Comics Chronicles around the middle of each month for the prior month's data. On some occasions, if I have time, I may be able to get an intermediate report online, with the Overall final analysis to come.

By John Jackson Miller on 3/18/2007 12:00 AM

And the first of the Monthly Sales charts is now online here, starting with February 2007. You can find the basic chart and statistical abstract here — my extended analysis of the numbers, along with some other details, is over on CBGXtra.

I'll be adding more months to this section as the weeks progress...