February 21, 2011
Analysts: January 2011 Direct Market Estimates
The comics business news and analysis site
ICv2.com has offered up their usual array of lists, estimates and analysis regarding the performance of comic books and graphic novels in the Direct Market of comic and hobby shops, this time for Jnauary 2011.
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Overview
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Analysis
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Top 300 Comic Books
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Top 300 Graphic Novels
My favorite numbers cruncher John Jackson Miller at
The Comics Chronicles has begun his analysis of the month
here.
Miller seems to be say the story of the month is that Diamond offered its clients a lot fewer comics for sale, including a lot of key titles, which on a short term basis and given series-to-series and book-to-book ordering habits is going to drive down sales overall. I agree with him this is the major point worth making, and I think most people saw this coming. In fact, my memory is that February and perhaps even March will feature similarly reduced numbers of comics for sale.
I think two other things are worth noting. First, the #2 comic sold just under 73,000 copies. Seeking an understanding for that performance in past charts seems to be a dead end. Viewing the estimated comic book sales for January 2009, for example, you see a few more comics performing at a top level, over 100K, and then a precipitous fall to a similar sales plateau, just a bit further down the charts. This could mean, I guess, that's the core audience right now for top books -- that the best-selling books that lack some sort of gimmicky interest fall to the 70k level or deeper. It's impossible to say. Certainly in 2008 many more books sold more than that 70k plateau. My hunch is that weaker than wished-for sales in the top 20 reflect in pretty ordinary fashion a buying strategy based on serving core readers, that there's not a ton of stuff that's exciting people in the standard series comics that's leading retailers to order more copies for sale. Everybody is hunkered down, which sort of makes sense in a winter month without a number of comics bearing the usual signifying factors for a sales pop. That doesn't mean it's a good thing, just an understandable thing.
The other thing that pops, of course, is the title that did excite retailers into buying extra copies that could be moved into their customers' hands:
Fantastic Four #587. I maintain that the story of how Marvel promoted that title -- which they're moving into its own title -- is a pretty basic lesson in how to goose interest in a series in order to gain it a new basic sales level from which it will then decline, which is worth noting in that it may be just about the only strategy available in an severely ossified market. In other words, you can't just make a good comic, you have to gain the system.
posted 7:00 am PST |
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