Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures - Distributor sales

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British Comics Sales
Interesting circulation info on the many British weeklies.

ComicBase
The longest-running and most successful inventory program for comics, Pete Bickford has incorporated circulation data into recent releases.

ComicBookPage
John Mayo has a number of tools on this site aggregating and sorting monthly sales reports. There's a lot of material here!

Comics Reporter
Tom Spurgeon's blog has many links to articles about the business side of comics publishing.

ComicsResearch
Good starting point for research with lots of links and bibliographies!

Grand Comics Database
An online project similar to the CBG/ComicBase database, this mammoth community undertaking includes justa bot every comic book you can think of — and many you never thought of!

ICv2
Milton Griepp does monthly tracking of Diamond data parallel to what's above — and publishes a lot of great info on the manga and bookstore markets.

Maggie Thompson
Maggie's beginning to post on her site many of the fanzines she was involved with; these include lots of comics history from the 1960s and earlier.

Newsarama
Matt Brady and Michael Doran's long-running news website gets into detail on a lot of behind-the-scenes information from the world of publishing. Now with a Comichron column!

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Tuesday, July 08, 2008

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Forum Data Corner Distributor sal... Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures

2/9/2008 8:22 PM

	mgrabois
3 posts

Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures

[originally posted 4/1/2007]

> John - At what point is your data going to transition from a single number that represents a monthly average over a year (from the Statements of Ownership), to estimated monthly sales data from the distributors? What data is out there prior to the mid-90's when your Diamond tracking starts at CBGXtra?

I'm working on tracking the sales of the Legion of Super-Heroes titles from 1960-2007 (there are some surprises, I'll post a link when I'm done). I have a gap at 1970 (waiting on the 1970's data for Action Comics), then another gap from 1987 until November 1996 since DC didn't do the Statements. After 11/96, I used your Diamond order numbers.

2/9/2008 8:24 PM

	John Jackson Miller
58 posts

Re: Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures

[originally posted 4/1/2007]

The most immediate resource -- sadly, not online, but it's in print -- is the Capital City data I published in the Standard Catalog of Comic Books, all editions. Granted, that only captures Capital, although we can make guesstimates from that to the wider world. There's a section in the front of the book that suggests Capital-to-overall ratios for each publisher.

For the future, I have most of the Diamond lists for the years before 1996 -- these will track back to the early 1990s at least -- and I have a data set of real sales figures that will allow me to unlock those. That is my next work in the Monthly category, but it will take some time as all of the Diamond lists will have to be scanned in, and then the decision has to be made about whether to present it on its own or to try to reconcile it with the Capital data. Any reconciliation would itself take some time, as we'd then be talking about a database project rather than simply running a single Excel file and publishing a list.

Best, John Jackson Miller • Curator, The Comics Chronicles

2/10/2008 4:39 PM

	John Mayo
7 posts

Re: Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures

[originally posted 4/3/2007]

I'd suggest that you start with the Diamond data and the Capital City data as distinct data streams. The advantage I see to this is that it gets the data up faster and allows for later comparisons to be done on Capital City versus Diamond sales. And, once the data is reconciled, you can also post the combined data as well.

I'm willing to help out on the reconciling of the Capital City and Diamond data when you get to that point.

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Monthly vs. Yearly sales figures