Jan 24

Written by: John Jackson Miller
1/24/2008 12:00 AM

The comics industry saw its seventh consecutive year of increased sales to comics shops in 2007.

Sales to retailers increased in every category tracked, including comic book units, which rose 4% to their highest level since 1997. Overall, Diamond Comic Distributors' sales of comic books and trade paperbacks to comics shops in North America were just shy of $430 million, up nearly $35 million over 2006. I estimate the figure to be the highest for the direct market since at least 1995, which was the second year of the fall-off from 1993's astronomical market peak.

Growth in trade paperback sales appears to have outpaced that of comic books in the direct market, resuming the trend seen earlier in the decade. The average price of comic books also increased again, to a weighted average of $3.17 for the year. Some summary statistics for the month, quarter, and year:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
December 2007: 7.03 million copies, up 1%
Q4 2007: 21.12 million copies, up less than 1%
2007 FINAL: 85.27 million comic books, up 4%

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES
December 2007: $22.61 million, up 3%
Q4 2007: $67.28 million, up 3%
2007 FINAL: $270 million, up 7%

TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
December 2007: $4.22 million, up 11%
Q4 2007: $15.72 million, up 15%
2007 FINAL: $57.15 million, up 18%

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
December 2007: $26.83 million, up 4%
Q4 2007: $82.99 million, up 5%
2007 FINAL: $327.1 million, up 9%

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
December 2007: $35.88 million, up 7%
Q4 2007: $111.1 million, up 7%
2007 FINAL: $429.9 million, up 9%

Click to see the charts for December 2007, and the comparative numbers for 1996-2007.

It is important to note what these numbers are and what they are not. The estimated $429.9 million includes every comic book, trade paperback, and magazine sold by Diamond Comic Distributors to its retail customers in North America. It does not count sales overseas. It does not count sales by other distributors through convenience stores, newsstands, and, importantly, mass-market bookstores. (The latter category's contribution is considerable.) And there is no guarantee that the comics shops actually sold all these comics — although sell-through rates today are far higher than they were in, say, the early 1990s, when many copies went unsold.

Update: With information from Brian Hibbs, we can estimate that the mass-market stores reporting to Bookscan had trade paperback sales of approximately $178 million. Those stores, he suggests, are approximately 75% of the total mass-market — meaning trade sales outside Diamond would be about $220 million. Given that Diamond's trade business is somewhere near $150 million — the $57 million from the Top 100 each month plus the lion's share of the $103 million that Diamond doesn't break down — that would mean that at $370 million, trade paperbacks are finally generating more than periodicals, industry-wide, if we figure that Diamond's $270 million in Top 300 comics plus newsstand sales can't reach that sum. I've adjusted the "industry-wide" estimates accordingly, and will adjust those further back as I get more data.

Tags: