by Brian Hibbs
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed
man is King”
Call me Mr. Squinty.
For the fifth
year in a row, I’m going to try to figure out something that can
only vaguely be seen and perceived: the size and shape of the sales
of books through the book store market, as seen through the prism
of BookScan.
Some preamble:
“Direct Market”
stores (also known as “your Local Comics Shop”) buy much of their
material for resale from Diamond Comics Distributors (though, not,
by any means, all – and many DM stores are also buying from
book distributors). DM stores seldom have Point-of-Sales (POS) systems
(though this is rapidly changing!!!), and, because we buy non-returnable,
what we track is in our side of the industry is what sells-in
to the store, not what sells-through to the eventual consumer.
In a very real way, this means that the DM store owner is the actual
customer of the publisher, as opposed to the end consumer.
The bookstore
market, however, buys their material returnable, where they can
send back some portion of titles that don’t sell. Because of this,
sell-through is the data that is tracked and trended. Bookstores
that have POS systems are able to report their sales to BookScan,
a subsidiary of Nielsen.
Each week, BookScan
generates a series of reports detailing the specific sales to consumers
through its client stores. The category we are most interested in
is “adult fiction overall graphic novels”. Given that the numbers
are Nielsen’s we can’t reproduce them complete, so you’ll just have
to trust me that it says what I say it says, alright?
(For points of
comparison, try these links [not all of which may work any longer]:
2006: BookScan Report
and My
Analysis
2005: BookScan Report
and My
Analysis
2004: BookScan Report
and My
Analysis
2003: BookScan Report
and My
Analysis)
Much like last
year’s report, what I’ve been given is the actual end-of-the-year
total report, as opposed to 2003-2005 where I only had the report
for the last week of the year. The effective difference for a casual
chart reader is probably very little, but it does change some of
the value in the percentage changes year-to-year. Please bear it
in mind when comparing this year’s report to the previous ones –
comparing 2007-to-2006 is probably as close to apples-to-apples
as it can get, as is 2003-to-2004-to-2005, but comparing the ’06-07
data to ’03-’05 isn’t going to be necessarily as valuable, and any
analysis I can make of comparative growth is going to be off by
some factor, possibly a significant one.
The biggest and
most obvious difference when doing straight comparisons will be
in the lower ends of the chart. This year, the “worst selling” book
in the Top 750 clears 4400 copies (it was ~4700 copies in ’06).
In ’03-‘05 there would be 200 or more items that didn’t have YTD
sales in that amount.
One other change
this year is that I now have the full and entire BookScan listing,
down to books that have only one copy sold YTD. However,
I’m not going to provide that entire list because that’s too much
data, even for a data-junkie like myself. I’ve cut the list off
at 750 items because that’s what we’ve reported in the previous
four years. Still, I have the deeper data, and I’ll add a quick
summary section for it a bit further down. Presuming I continue
to get that much data going forward, I should be able to tell you
a few things about “The
Long Tail”. I possess data on nearly 13,200 items now!
This is not
a list of every book that sold through every book
store – the report is limited to those stores that report through
BookScan. According to BookScan, more than 7500 venues are now reporting
to them, but this still leaves many venues that don’t. Like I said
in my first analysis:
But who are the retailers who report to BookScan? According
to the list that I have, there are over 7400 potential BookScan
venues. This list includes almost 300 independent bookstores, as
well as chain retailers, B. Dalton / Barnes and Noble, Borders /
Waldenbooks, Tower Music and Books, Musicland, Deseret Book Company
(Mormon bookstores), Follett Stores (University bookstores), Hastings,
Costco, K-Mart, and Target. BookScan also tracks online sales from
Amazon.com, B&N.com, Borders.com, Buy.com, Fatbrain.com, and
Powells.com.
That’s still a fair number of places that sell our product
that aren’t represented – beyond traditional book retailers who
don’t report to BookScan (Say, a number of indie bookstores), and
mass market retailers like Wal-Mart. This also doesn’t track any
number of other channels -- like library sales, or other specialty
markets like, say, LGBT stores, etc. This
Publisher’s Weekly article [from 2003, I wish they’d check
in on this story for the 2008 reality!] (you’ll have to subscribe
to read it, sorry) says the following:
BookScan generally claims to represent between 70% and 75%
of sales in the industry (Wal-Mart and some of the supermarket chains
are among those who decline to report.) But a comparison with in-print
figures supplied by publishers reveals that the numbers are more
likely to represent about 65%, even after deducting for unsold books
and returns.
For BookScan's top ten nonfiction titles published last year
- a list that include mass-market favorites like Phil McGraw's diet
books as well as indie hits like Benjamin Franklin: An American
Life - no title had BookScan sales comprise more than 75% of total
sales. For some of the books that had strong special-sales, they
ran as low as 25%.
Frankly, I haven’t
bothered to ask BookScan for a client list every year, so it is
pretty likely that the number or volume of stores has increased
significantly since 2003. However, I’m also going to continue to
assume that the Publisher’s Weekly article is still accurate to
the extent that these numbers are unreported by some potentially
significant degree, and don’t, in any way, represent all
“book stores” selling comic book material.
Also, remember
that this analysis represents RETAIL SALES. This absolutely doesn’t
include anything like Library sales, or Academic Sales, or things
like books clubs and so on. Those are not RETAIL SALES. This is
all about “person with an extra $20 in their pocket”, so don’t conflate
anything else from this.
There’s also a
certain amount of miscategorization going on. As an example, every
volume of the manga series Love Hina can be found in my full
copy of the sales report, except for volume 2. In the Great Big
Database there’s apparently an error and Love Hina volume
2 isn’t listed as a “graphic novel”. Conversely, a few prose books
always sneak on to the list – Bloody Crown of Conan makes
its fifth annual appearance as a not-comic. I do not know what the
actual extent of miscategorization might be and how it would impact
any of the general data analysis!
Really, what I’m
trying to get across to you is that this really is potentially unreliable
data in terms of the absolute and total number of books sold, and
is only able to give the broadest outline of what’s happening in
book stores, based upon the data-set that I’m being given, which
is in no way comprehensive. I still think that’s better than
having no information, so I persevere in writing this each
year.
We’ll talk some
more about the DM and how it compares a bit further down in the
column.
As always, if
you can get a hold of them, I strongly encourage you to look at
the BookScan numbers on your own and make your own conclusions –
I’m trying to be balanced and fair, but, of course, I have huge
bookshelves worth of biases I’m dragging around with me, and your
analysis might be more correct than my own.
* * *
OK, that’s the
boilerplate out of the way, let’s start looking at the data.
Here’s the big
picture:
Year |
Total Pieces |
Growth |
Total Dollars |
Growth |
2003 |
5,495,584 |
|
$66,729,053 |
|
2004 |
6,071,123 |
10.5% |
$67,783,487 |
1.6% |
2005 |
7,007,345 |
15.4% |
$75,459,669 |
11.3% |
2006 |
8,395,195 |
19.8% |
$90,411,902 |
19.8% |
2007 |
8,584,317 |
2.3% |
$95,174,425 |
5.27% |
The sum of the
Top 750 in 2007 is 8,584,317 pieces for a total of $95,174,425 at
full retail. I want to note that the nearly 20% of growth in 2006
was almost certainly overstated because of the difference in reporting
methodologies between 2005 and 2006. Read 2006’s report
for more detail. My estimate was that it was probably closer to
10-12%.
Having said that,
this is a clear slowdown in the growth of the bookstore market in
2007. There’s still growth, yes, but it’s not the double-digit growth
that we’ve come to expect. What’s most curious about this to me
is that the Direct Market is said to have had an 18% growth
in 2007 in GN/TP sales – and the DM is a mature and very established
marketplace, while the Bookstores really should still be in their
“honeymoon” phase with comics material, and should, in my
opinion, be seeing greater growth. Obviously, I have no real information
of the overall levels of growth in bookstores in general (doing
a GN-driven report is difficult enough, thanks), so the book market
may still be looking at this as excellent growth, but in relationship
against the Direct Market, they’re growing at a significantly
slower rate.
The book selling
the most pieces in 2007 was Naruto v13 with 80,423 pieces
sold. Like last year, you can probably call it Naruto’s year,
as all 27 (!) volumes chart, and they all chart within the
top 100 (or Top 65, to be more precise) – that’s a pretty major
accomplishment. There’s only one minor “but” here, however – in
2006, Naruto v9 was the #1 top-selling book, and it sold
101,457 copies. That’s around a 20% drop from this year’s best-selling
number, and may indicate that the Naruto phenomenon is waning.
Of course that is to be expected, I think, when last year we had
12 volumes of the title, and this year we had 27!
What’s slightly
more curious to me is that the next highest placing Naruto
volume (v1 at 67,147, and chart position #3) is nearly 16% down
from v13. And v14 (#4 on the chart) is down to 62k. That’s a pretty
huge gap, and I wonder if there’s something else going on that I
can’t see from looking at a one-time-snapshot-at-year’s-end chart
– 13-18k copies is a pretty big gap after all. It appears to me
that Naruto, despite its success, is slowing down dramatically.
Still, even with
that, the 27 volumes of Naruto combined sold 1.18 million
copies in 2007 – I suspect that Viz is pretty unworried about the
slowdown because that’s still a very, very impressive number. In
2006, the 12 volumes of Naruto released at that point sold
917k copies.
In terms of gross
dollars, 2007’s #1 book was Frank Miller’s 300 with of $2.1
million, at full retail, in sales. Whew! That’s a big-ass number,
the largest we’ve ever seen from these charts! (2006’s #1 book was
V For Vendetta, selling nearly $1.6 million dollars of copies)
Given 300’s thirty dollar price tag, I suspect we won’t see
that large a number in the years to come.
That wasn’t the
only “million dollar book”, in fact, there were three others!
– the $150 boxed compilation of the Mad Magazine Art of
Don Martin grossed over $1.32 million in retail sales, the hardcover
of Stephen King’s Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, came really
close to that with an impressive $1.29 million dollars in sales,
and (while not technically a comic, is still on this particular
chart), the DK Publishing Marvel Encyclopedia scored $1.23
million in gross retail sales.
Watchmen came really close to joining
that club, with just more than $908k in sales. In fact, those top
five books generated nearly $6.9 million gross dollars in retail
sales (or about 7.25% of the total dollars sold for the year), compared
to 2006’s $4.7 million dollars for the top five.
Just for comparison’s
sake, last year’s #1 quantity book, Naruto v9 (101k), sold
nearly 32k this year – roughly a third of last year. Last year’s
#1 dollar book, V For Vendetta ($1.6 million), sold about
$390k in 2007 – roughly a quarter of last year.
In terms of “The
Long Tail”, items #751-13,177 (the absolute bottom of the chart)
sold just over 6.8 million pieces, for $87.9 million dollars. This
makes the total number of books sold through BookScan-tracked sources
to be 15.4 million pieces, and over $183 million dollars.
If we assume that
the Publisher’s Weekly article referenced above is correct
and that BookScan is only tracking 75%-ish of sales, it could be
inferred that the total non-Direct Market market-size for Retail
Sales of TPs and GNs is something along the lines of 21 million
pieces, and $244 million (at full retail). This inference might
also be very very wrong, however, given all of the caveats
I have noted.
Currently 49 of
the top 750 titles (7%) each year are “evergreen” – that is to say
that they’ve appeared on each and every BookScan Top 750 since 2003.
This is a stupidly flawed data-point, because it doesn’t give any
weight to anything published after 2003, but I’m going to stubbornly
cling to it as something of some significance, because I always
have.
As I do every
year, I’ve arbitrarily divvied the Top 750 list into one of five
categories: Humor, Manga, DC, Marvel, and the ever-wonderful Everything
Else. While such categorization is horrifically subjective (Is Asterix
“humor”? Is The Simpsons? And that’s why I’m not showing
that part of my work, to avoid such debates), I did it so to try
and track the distinctions between “traditional” bookstore material
(e.g., humor books like Garfield, or Far Side); Direct
Market-driven material (i.e., Marvel, DC, and most of the “Everything
Else” group); and Manga.
So, here’s the
year-to-year comparison between my categories:
For Humor:
In 2006, “Humor”
books, the traditional pre-y2k owner of the sales charts, place
only 8 titles on the Top 750 chart. These titles represent 54,093
units with a total retail of $1,990,296. For some comparative history,
check the chart below.
Year |
# of placing titles |
Unit sales |
Dollar sales |
2003 |
125 |
1,246,141 |
$16,095,800 |
2004 |
108 |
829,279 |
$11,460,533 |
2005 |
35 |
428,941 |
$5,904,947 |
2006 |
34 |
357,424 |
$5,060,097 |
2007 |
8 |
54,093 |
$1,990,296 |
OK, something
dramatically changed in the reporting this year – virtually every
“humor” book (eg: Calvin & Hobbes, Fantagraphics’ Peanuts
reprints, Bongo’s Simpsons titles) have, as far as I can
tell, utterly vanished from the BookScan report. No, they’re not
down in the “Long Tail” either. I am assuming that they’ve somehow
been recategorized in some fashion.
For “strips” like
Calvin or Peanuts, this sorta kinda makes sense –
while they may be “comics” they aren’t “graphic novels”; except
there’s several things I can find deeper in the list that are also
strips that haven’t been recategorized (example: IDW’s Dick Tracy
reprints) – but it doesn’t make a lick of sense for the Bongo/Harper
Simpsons comics. Those are collections of previously published
serialized comic books!
Further, the purging
isn’t exactly complete – within the Top 750, I can still find one
of the Bongo Bartman volumes, a Far Side book, a Foxtrots
book, and one of Ballantine’s Peanuts volumes. Deeper in
the Long Tail, I can find another score or so of similar examples
without even looking hard.
So, unless I’ve
somehow got a (badly) edited list (though why anyone would cut those
examples and not my others, would be a deep mystery), or, unless
BookScan reverts back to the old categories next year, I’m going
to drop this section, and just fold it into “everything else” next
year. If anyone in “real” publishing has a clue what’s going on
here, I’d love to know! I’ve checked with a few sources, and they
all tell me the reports they see show the same thing, but I’m not
at all clear why this change was made.
With only eight
titles in this section, they’re fairly easy to deal with. The best-seller
of them is The Far Side Gallery #5, with 10,124 copies sold.
The Far Side Gallery #5 is an “evergreen” title –that is,
it has appeared on every BookScan Top 750 list going back to the
first one I have in 2003. Sales have been steadily declining on
the title over the years: in 2003 it sold 22,690 copies, while in
2006 it sold 12,218 copies. Over the years virtually all strip collections
have pretty much been declining year-to-year, for the most part
this was because the ones that charted tended to be strips that
were no longer running, and there wasn’t anything new coming in
to replace them. The Far Side hasn’t had a new strip since 1995.
The #2 charting
“humor” book is the Complete Don Martin book mentioned in
the introductory section. While it “only” sold 8815 copies, thanks
to its $150 price tag, it grossed over $1.3 million dollars, making
it the second highest dollar volume book on the entire chart, handily
beating everything except Frank Miller’s 300.
Coming in at #3
& #4 are volumes 3 & 4 of Penny Arcade. I included
these in “Humor”, rather than “Everything Else” because these are
collections of strips. While they appear on the internet rather
than in your newspaper, they seem to be to very much be the children
of the “traditional” kind of cartooning, rather than coming from
a GN-tradition. They sell 7951 and 6982, respectively.
#5 is The Assorted
Foxtrot, which is also an “Evergreen” title. It sold 5243 copies
this year, as compared to 6857 last year.
#6 is Bartman:
The Best of the Best, with 5147 copies sold. This is the only
Simpsons comic to appear anywhere on my list this year, which means
The Simpsons must have been recategorized, for they were
otherwise not only very steady sellers, but one of the unsung heroes
of graphic novel sales. Regardless of what you think about strip
collections belonging on a “GN” chart, the Simpsons books
were very clearly the latter.
#7 is Devil’s
Due’s Family Guy collection, with 5057 copies sold. I listed
it with Humor mostly because I listed The Simpsons there.
Finally, at #8,
there’s Its a Dog’s Life, Snoopy which is a Peanuts collection
from Ballantine. It hits with 4774 copies, and is our sole representation
of the Peanuts on this list, because the Fantagraphics collections
have been apparently reclassified.
Another glaring
omission to me is The Book of Bunny Suicides, which was #1
in this category in 2005, and #2 in 2006. In 2007, it’s vanished
from the list entirely.
Like I said, this
will probably be the last time you see these books broken out this
way, but I did really like having a relatively small category to
start with before getting into the “Big Boys”. Ah well…
For Manga:
Once again, the
largest section of titles, by far. In 2007, Manga dominates with
575 spots (out of 750) on the charts for 6.8 million pieces, and
$62 million in retail dollars.
Here’s a year-to-year
comparison chart:
Year |
# of placing titles |
Unit sales |
Dollar sales |
2003 |
447 |
3,361,966 |
$34,368,409 |
2004 |
518 |
4,603,558 |
$45,069,684 |
2005 |
594 |
5,691,425 |
$53,922,514 |
2006 |
575 |
6,705,624 |
$61,097,050 |
2007 |
575 |
6,837,355 |
$61,927,238 |
Just to get a
little meta here, over the years several manga-related blogs copied
out this section (and just this section) of the report. If you’re
reading this in a report not on Newsarama, I strongly urge you to
go to the source link and read the preamble
to this article – several facts about reporting methodology change
from year to year, and may change your perception of the numbers!
One of my three
indicators – the raw number of titles placing on the charts, unit
sales and dollar sales – the first is dead even with last year.
However, it is my belief that had the traditional “humor” books
been charted this year, Manga is the category it would have eaten
the most into. The other two indicators are up, albeit by a tremendously
small amount. I think it is safe to say that manga is still growing,
but certainly nowhere near as “explosively” as it once did, and
it is possible that the category has peaked. Nearly a 40% unit growth
from ’03 to ’04, 22% from ’04 to ’05, and about 20% from ’05 to
’06, but well under 2% from ’06 to ’07. It appears that manga is
starting to “mature” as a category, but I had expected that we’d
still have seen growth of at least 5%. The fairly drastic drop in
the rate of growth is, perhaps, worrying. Regardless of that, 77%
of the Top 750 are manga volumes.
The winner of
the 2007, just as 2006, unquestionably is Naruto. With 27
volumes in print in 2007, Naruto racked up 1.18 million copies
sold in the aggregate – that’s 17% of the total manga sold in the
Top 750, simply breathtaking.
Still, in some
ways, 2007’s success with Naruto is less stellar than that
of 2006’s – in ’06, 11 of the 12 then-extant Naruto volumes
were the top 11 selling manga volumes. This year, however, Naruto
shares the Top 10 manga titles with Fruits Basket, Death
Note and Bleach.
The “worst selling”
volume of Naruto (v10 with “only” 27,898 copies sold) is
the fifty-eighth best-selling manga title (as opposed to
#16 last year), this shows a deep softening in the Naruto
brand, or, perhaps a saturation. As I’m sure you’ll remember, the
last four months of 2007 had a promotional campaign called “Naruto
nation” where they released three volumes of the series each month.
The question becomes the chicken or the egg – was the relative slowdown
of Naruto sales (917k copies over 12 volumes in 2006, versus
1.18 million copies over 27 volumes in 2007) a result of,
or a response to the “Naruto nation” promotion?
Such things are
pretty hard to tell with a one-time snapshot like this, but given
that the “worse selling” volume is v10 (followed quickly by v9 and
v11), all of which were released well before the announcement
of the NN promotion in May, I’m going to go ahead and conclude
that the sales were starting to slow before the NN promotion. Accordingly,
pumping out twelve volumes in four months was probably a sensible
decision driven more by the sales reality than the stated desire
to catch up to Japan’s production – had those twelve volumes come
out over the course of twelve months, rather than four, the total
sales would have likely been much lower.
Either way, I
doubt anyone at Viz is complaining much, those 27 Naruto volumes
represent 14% of the total number of all books sold
in the Top 750. That’s pretty darn staggering.
Again, like last
year what we’re seeing is that entire series are charting – there
are 27 different volumes of Naruto on the charts, after all,
which is about 4% of the total of 750 items we’re looking at. Much
like last year, the 575 manga titles only represents 140 different
properties, if I’m counting correctly (and I may not be). It certainly
seems to me that because rack space is not infinite, more popular
series appear to be squeezing less popular series out.
That is, of course,
to be expected, but it seems to me that there are two other things
going on here as well. The first is that the “Big Hit”, as exemplified
by Naruto, appears to be getting smaller. The second is that
I’m not sure that there’s any new hits being generated that aren’t
directly a result of a concurrent anime show being broadcast. I’m
nowhere near as conversant with anime as I probably could be, but
it seems to me that the top of the charts are dominated by (roughly
in order) Naruto, Fruits Basket, Bleach, Death
Note, and Pokemon – all of which are currently showing
in strong anime rotation. Unless I am mistaken, the only two Manga
titles breaking 25k in sales that aren’t also supported by a show
are Vampire Knight and Kingdom Hearts, and Kingdom
Hearts is based on a popular video game and has Disney characters
in it.
Not having studied
the matter particularly, I’m sure that my assumption here is pretty
shallow and there’s a much more complex relationship between manga
sales and anime-rotation than I am positing.
In following this
for five years, we have a list of 30 manga titles that have been
on each and every list since 2003. That’s an amazing percentage
(4%, yeesh) of the 750 titles we regularly look at, and that’s a
lot more “legs” on many series then I ever would have predicted.
There are 13 different series in this “evergreen” list, and it includes
(all v1 unless otherwise noted) Azumanga Daioh, Beet the
Vandal Buster, Chobits (v1-6), FLCL (v1&2),
Hack//Legend of the Twilight (v1 & 2), Hellsing,
Inu Yasha (v1-6), Love Hina (v1, 3&4) [Note: Love
Hina v2 has never appeared on one of these lists in five years
and is, probably, mis-categorized], Naruto (V1&2), Ranma
½ (V1 & 2), Rurouni Kenshin (v1 & 2), Shaman
King, and Trigun.
Breaking down
the manga portion of the chart by publisher, Viz takes 338 of the
575 manga spots, making them the clear dominant player. Of the data
set we’re looking at, Viz charted 4.6 million pieces, for just under
$39 million. This is solely by translated manga, with no “OEL” (Original
English Language) titles at all.
59% of all manga
charted by BookScan is Viz’s, and they are almost 45% of all
TPs shown, which is astonishing for any publisher. Viz’s mean “average” title within the Top
750 sold 13,540 copies per book. Their median title sold 7770 copies.
Viz is the dominant player here, and by a pretty wide margin.
In addition to
the clear dominance of Naruto, I also want to point strongly
to both Bleach and Death Note as stellar performers
– the first volume of each topped 50k, and every following volume
made the top 100 manga titles. 60% of the manga Top 100 is one of
those three titles. Viz also did very well with various Pokemon-related
titles, as well as Vampire Knight. Viz also did well with
Fullmetal Alchemist and Absolute Boyfriend, both of
which charted multiple volumes. Over 20k, Viz also hit with the
first volumes of Gentlemen’s Alliance, and Millennium
Snow.
Tokyopop is the
#2 manga publisher, with 148 titles charting – that includes their
OEL (like Dramacon), as well as their licensed books like
Hannah Montana and High School Musical. Subtracting
those, there’d only be 130 “actually manga” titles charting. I’m
including everything however, and Tpop brings in 1.6 million pieces,
$15.6 million retail dollars.
Tpop doesn’t even
do half of Viz’s business. Still, don’t feel too bad for them –
Tokyopop is still taking 24% of the volume of manga that BookScan
shows. Their mean average is 10,842 copies sold, while their median
title did 10,795 copies. Tokyopop’s best-selling title is Fruits
Basket v16 with an excellent 58,372 copies sold in 2007.
In addition to
Fruits Basket, Tpop did exceptionally well with various Kingdom
Hearts volumes, and with Loveless. And Tpop’s #3 book,
Warriors: The Lost Warrior, which, if I’m understanding my
Google results properly is a spin-off of a prose novel series, did
exceptionally well as a stand-alone book with 43,239 copies sold.
Coming in at #3
is Del Rey, with 56 books charting, for 450,853 pieces and $4.7
million retail dollars. Mean average of 8051, median of 6789. Their
average numbers have dropped a great deal from last year’s report,
probably reflecting the general weakening of manga in the face of
the number of titles available. Their best selling title in 2007
was Negima v13 with 22,137 copies sold.
#4 is Dark Horse,
but they only place 12 books for 75,768 pieces and $1.02 million
retail. Mean average 6314, median 5584. Best seller was Hellsing
v8 coming in at 13,942 copies sold. Six of the twelve Dark Horse
books placing are Hellsing.
The #5 publisher
is ADV, placing just 7 titles for 44k copies and $710k retail dollars
– mean of 6297, and median of 5065. Their best-seller is Yotsuba&!
V4 with 11,213 copies sold.
The rest of the
publishers that chart – Broccoli (5 titles), DC/CMX and Go! (2 each),
and five other publishers with a single book each – do so for a
meager for 14 different titles sold. The only thing in that batch
that I would consider a real success (over 10k) is Megatokyo
v5 from DC which, with sales of 11,112, nearly triple DC’s next
closest from-Japan title. In fact, based purely on the BookScan
charts and nothing else, I don’t understand at all why DC/CMX is
churning out a dozen or better releases a month. The sales in the
book channel are absolutely not there for that kind of a release
schedule.
It might also
be worth noting that the combined volume of publishers #3-9 doesn’t
even come close to matching the volume of Tokyopop alone. Viz and
Tokyopop combined represent 486 of the 575 (85%) of all manga titles
listed – that’s up from 84% last year, and 83% from the year before.
And if you look at it in terms of pieces it is even worse: 2 publishers
represent 6.2 million pieces of 6.6 million for the category – that’s
95%! And people say the Direct Market is lopsided!! Seriously folks,
Marvel & DC have nothing on Viz and Tokyopop!
Looking at things
more generally, manga as a whole represents 4 of the Top 5, 17 of
the Top 20, 45 of the Top 50, and 84 of the Top 100 for 2007 – that’s
a virtually identical performance to 2006. There are 9 manga titles
that sold over 50k units – last year that was 13. There are 82 that
sold over 20k – up from 67 in 2006. Perhaps more worryingly, 89
manga titles in the Top 750 have sales below 5k, way up from 2006’s
37.
Taking a look
at OEL (in which I include most of the licensed titles), there are
(if I’m counting correctly, and I may not be) 20 OEL titles, up
from 13 in 2006. As noted above Warriors: The Lost Warrior
is the big winner with over 43k copies sold, but the Warcraft
series and Hannah Montana also did well. If you’re a OEL
purist, and you don’t want to include licensed titles, there are
really five things to look at: Dramacon (with three volumes),
Megatokyo (only the two DC volumes chart, why can’t Dark
Horse sell theirs?) My Dead Girlfriend, and one volume of
Bizenghast. In the sub-5k OEL race, Avalon High also
just barely limps in (you probably wouldn’t have seen this if the
“humor” books hadn’t been recategorized)
Both Bizenghast
and Dramacon are hitting multi-year numbers that would do
any normal Western-style publisher very proud.
On a somewhat
personal note, I got a rather nasty email from what I inferred was
an employee of one of the manga publishers last year, from an obvious
fake and temporary gmail account (seriously: it was something along
the lines of MathIsReallyHard@gmail.com) accusing me of ignoring
the depth of backlist in my analysis. The reality is, this is the
first year I’ve ever gotten a look at the Long Tail, and one can’t
analyze what one doesn’t have.
But for that anonymous
commenter, here’s what I can tell you: Viz and Tokyopop combined
represent 4010 entries in the 13,177-long database that I have.
They together represent 9.3 million books sold, for $85.5 million
dollars at full retail. Of those totals, Tpop is 3.07m pieces, and
$30.4m at full retail, while Viz is 6.25m pieces, and $55.1m at
full retail. That certainly makes Tpop a little closer to Viz, but
not, really, by a great deal.
For DC:
2007 was largely
a continuation of 2006 for DC, in the bookstores. They placed 58
titles in the Top 750, with total unit sales of 487,467, and $9,953,976
in retail dollar sales.
Here’s a year-to-year
comparison chart:
Year |
# of placing titles |
Unit sales |
Dollar sales |
2003 |
74 |
336,569 |
$6,151,258 |
2004 |
39 |
179,440 |
$3,135,983 |
2005 |
42 |
298,484 |
$5,440,001 |
2006 |
59 |
551,160 |
$10,246,082 |
2007 |
58 |
487,467 |
$9,953,976 |
While DC’s 2007
numbers in the Top 750 are down a smidge from 2006 (by 63,693 pieces),
what they’re down by is nearly exactly the drop in sales on V
For Vendetta. In 2006 V For Vendetta sold 79,907 copies
in TP (and 5992 in HC!), and those sales were pretty clearly driven
by the film version (and the home video release). In 2007, V
For Vendetta “only” sold 19,495 copies in TP (and deeper in
the Long Tail, 1152 in HC) in 2007, so if one were to factor that
out, DC gained by a smidge in the markets that BookScan tracks.
DC’s #1 book for
2007 is Watchmen, with 45,449 sold. That’s up from 37k in
2006 and 17k in 2005, and the beautiful thing from DC’s point of
view is that really can’t help but climb through 2008 and 2009 when
the Watchmen film is released, and then goes into home video.
Even if the movie stinks on ice, I’d expect Watchmen to come
at or near 80k in the book market in 2008. Not bad for a twenty
year old story, really. As noted above, Watchmen came really close
to grossing a million dollars in retail sales in 2007 without a
film driving it – the actual figure was $908,525.
[I’m also going
to expect that Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is going to
explode in 2008 with the next Batman film on the horizon, though
history shows that “single books” do a whole lot better than “franchised”
titles via the mass market when it comes to film adaptations, because
there is an easier sales hook]
DC’s second best
seller in 2007 is the Heroes HC, which racks up 25,193 copies
sold, for $755k in retail sales, which is a really great performance
for material that is available 100% free, on-line.
Other stellar
(over 12k) sellers include the aforementioned V For Vendetta
(19k), Dark Knight (18k), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
Black Dossier (14k), and Batman: Long Halloween and Sandman
v1 (both at 12k)
In terms of dollars,
the big winners (over a quarter million dollars in gross retail
sales) are Watchmen ($908k), Heroes ($755k), Absolute
Sandman v2 ($594k) and v1 ($479k), LOEG: Black Dossier
($436k), V For Vendetta ($390k), and Dark Knight Returns
($271k)
In terms of “media
impact”, DC also does alright for itself with the TP of Stardust
(7313 copies), but that’s probably less than you were expecting,
given the film. Stardust, however, had direct competition
from the straight-prose (no Charles Vess illustrations) version
which I’m suspecting did better. I don’t have access to prose-only
lists, however, so that’s just a guess.
Looking at it
by “imprint”, 24 of DC’s 58 placing titles are Vertigo (Nine Sandman
[including the Absolute HCs], seven Fables, four Y, the
Last Man, and single enteries with Neverwhere, Pride
of Baghdad, Stardust and V For Vendetta), that’s
up quite a bit from 2006, where they only had 19 books chart.
Wildstorm places
4 titles, but none of them are “Wildstorm U” – The aforementioned
Heroes, and LOEG v1 & 2, and Black Dossier
is it.
The remaining
30 titles are branded as DC. However two of them (Watchmen
and Ronin) aren’t properly “DCU”. There are nine “Batman”
titles, seven “Superman” books (counting Superman/Batman
as a “Superman” title), five “event” comics tracking (three volumes
of 52, Infinite Crisis, and Identity Crisis),
and four “Justice League” titles (v1 of the Meltzer run, and all
three volumes of the Alex Ross Justice series). The other
three DCU tracking books are Kingdom Come, Green Lantern:
Rebirth, and v6 of Teen Titans.
These titles tracking
(especially, to me, 52) says that the oft-repeated line that
the bookstore environment isn’t interested in superhero comics,
especially ones tied to “continuity”, is clearly wrong. In particular,
52 v1 outsells every Vertigo title except for V For Vendetta
and Sandman v1. That’s hardly a sign of a market rejecting
the superhero genre, in my opinion.
Not one of the
Minx titles makes the Top 750, nor does any CMX title except for
Megatokyo, which is OEL. Looking deep into the Long Tail,
Minx’s Plain Janes sells 3201 copies, none of the other four
Minx titles even manages to crack a meager 800 copies sold in the
bookstore environment. Aren’t those books specifically designed
for the bookstores, and the customers that shop there?
There’s a lot
of conventional wisdom that suggests that things like the Minx and
Vertigo books sell oodles and oodles better in the bookstore market
than the do in the DM, but I have to tell you, now that I’m looking
at the “full” BookScan list, I can guarantee you that this is simply
false. Now that I can see into the Long Tail, what I can tell you
is that, while the bookstore market can (potentially) sell more
copies of the “top” of the “bookstore-oriented” material, on anything
else the DM beats them handily.
Here’s just one
example: none of the three American Virgin trades charted
more than 400 copies sold on BookScan; we can pretty definitively
state that each of those three sold at least 2000 copies
in the DM (because their first month, alone, sold-in more copies
than that) Many many Vertigo titles are selling 3-5x as many copies
in the DM, as they did through BookScan.
Now, of course,
the DM and BookScan accounts are not the grand total of all venues
possible – there are also library sales, book clubs, academic sales,
and probably another dozen channels that I’m not thinking of – it
is entirely possible that these works could be doing gangbusters
in those channels, and we’ll never have any way of knowing, but
I can state, pretty unequivocally, when it comes to comparing the
two primary retail sales channels, the DM is absolutely selling
more copies of most Western-originated comics. It isn’t even
close.
(and, since we
were speaking of the Long Tail, DC scores a total of 1.18 million
books when looking at the full and complete BookScan list, for just
over $22 million in sales)
DC’s “evergreen”
list (the books that have charted every year since 2003) is one
down from last years – Crisis on Infinite Earths fell off
this year – now it is twelve titles long. Five of them are Batman
(Year One, Dark Knight Returns, Long Halloween,
Hush v1 & v2), three of them are Alan Moore Books (Watchmen,
LOEG v1 & v2), three of them are Sandman (Endless
Nights, v1, v7), and there’s also Kingdom Come. This
statistic is probably essentially meaningless, since it doesn’t
track something “evergreen” that was created after 2003,
but those are still some solidly performing titles.
The mean average
DC title sold 8405 copies, while the median book was 6668 copies.
This does not count the two volumes of Megatokyo that charted
– those are in the “manga” section. DC has no titles this year that
top 50k, two that top 20k (Watchmen, and Heroes),
and nine that chart under 5k.
For Marvel:
Marvel did significantly
better in 2007 in the bookstores, versus 2006. They placed 37 titles
for 376,918 units and $7.6 million dollars in retail dollars.
Here’s a year-to-year
comparison chart:
Year |
# of placing titles |
Unit sales |
Dollar sales |
2003 |
73 |
455,553 |
$8,428,962 |
2004 |
50 |
227,985 |
$3,756,764 |
2005 |
26 |
153,317 |
$2,459,027 |
2006 |
33 |
294,852 |
$5,702,307 |
2007 |
37 |
376,918 |
$7,599,057 |
As should be no
significant surprise to anyone anywhere, Marvel had a major hit
in the book stores this year with Stephen King’s Dark Tower:
The Gunslinger Born HC. Marvel sold 51,714 copies via BookScan-reporting
sources, for a gross of nearly $1.3 million dollars. That’s a huge
success, and is the eighth best- selling title for the year.
However, I’m surprised
it isn’t actually higher, for a couple of reasons. First: it isn’t
the highest Western comic on the sales list – Frank Miller’s 300
sold 72k copies, and while that did have a movie behind it, Stephen
King is certainly a more familiar name to bookstore buyers than
Miller is, and so I would have expected a higher number.
Second: my sense
of it, without any easily searchable anecdotes on the internet,
is that that level of sales would be considered a failure for a
prose book by Mr. King. Comics are not prose, of course, and Dark
Tower isn’t a wholly new story, but still.
Third: the internet
pundits love to declare that “real” people (that is, those not already
reading comics, or predisposed to the medium) are not at all interested
in serialized fiction, and that they only want complete volumes
if they’re going to bother to read comics at all. However, sales
of the periodical version of Dark Tower through Diamond
appear
to top 216k for issue #1 of the serialization – some four times
as many copies. Even issue #7, the “worst” selling of the serialized
issues, topped 124k. Could it be that the pundits are actually mistaken,
he asked snarkily?
Maybe the audience
is holding out for an eventual, cheaper, softcover release?
(Just for a point
of comparison, it appears that the DM sold just over 15k copies
of the HC)
But it wasn’t
only King livening up The House in 2007, they also had a little
story called Civil War that maybe some of you have heard
of? Marvel managed to sell 32,528 copies of the collection of that
mini-series into the BookScan venues, for a gross of almost $813k.
(And to continue
to the comparison, the DM sold more than 46k copies of Civil
War)
The main Civil
War trade is only part of the picture, in fact – Marvel charted
twelve other books related to Civil War in to the Top 750,
for another 99,683 pieces and $1.5 million dollars. All told, the
Civil War “brand” through the BookScan top 750 sold more than 132k
books, and $2.3 million dollars. Do you still believe that “bookstore
customer” doesn’t want continuity-heavy superhero comics?
Marvel’s #3 best-selling
title into the bookstore market was the first hardcover of Anita
Blake: Vampire Hunter. That moved nearly 22k copies, and grossed
$438k in sales.
For #4, you get
Marvel Zombies, with nearly 18k copies sold (and Marvel
Zombies/Army of Darkness comes in at #6 for nearly 13k copies
sold)
Their fifth best-selling
book in 2007 was the Halo Graphic Novel, which sold just
over 14k copies. Halo sold over 32k copies in 2006.
There’s very little
“media bounce” for Marvel’s films in 2007 – Spider-Man 3
came out on home video in 2007, and while Ultimate Spider-Man
v6: Venom manages to sell 8859 copies, and Spider-Man: Birth
of Venom sells 8104 copies, that’s about it for Spidey (except
for the Civil War tie-in volume). Both the first Ultimate
volume (5120 copies) and the most recent one, v18 (4835 copies),
also appear, but those would in a normal year, anyway.
2007 also had
the Ghost Rider film, and they get a little eensey amount
of traction – Road to Damnation comes in with 5086 copies,
and Vicious Cycle does 4770 copies, but it’s difficult to
call either especially significant.
I suspect that
the Iron Man film in 2008 might help Marvel’s sales on that
property to some degree, but I can’t really picture the second Hulk
film giving much of a bounce. I guess we’ll find out in another
year!
Much like last
year, none of Marvel’s kid-oriented digests appear anywhere within
the top 750, but thanks to having the Long Tail, I can tell you
that the one that sells the best doesn’t even mange 2800 copies,
with the vast majority of them selling under 1000 copies for the
entire year (and most under 500 copies). Logically, these books
have to be selling somewhere, otherwise they wouldn’t have such
an aggressive publication schedule, but they don’t seem to be moving
any significant number of copies in any retail source that can be
tracked. Perhaps they’re selling to libraries or at school book
fairs?
(Speaking of the
Long Tail, Marvel sells just over 1.03 million books this year,
for almost $20 million in retail sales, if they went at full retail.
This includes the one [1] copy of Bill Jemas’ Marville sold
in 2007. It seems that U decided! Still, that’s really surprisingly
close to DC’s Long Tail, given that DC had a decade-plus jump on
Marvel in the bookstores)
The rest of the
Dabel Brothers-oriented titles (Hedge Knight, Magician’s
Apprentice, and so on) fail to chart within the top 750 – if
it weren’t for Anita Blake, I’d call the whole thing a failure.
Not much else
leaps out from the Marvel charts with a couple of exceptions. First:
“event” comics continue to do decently – the Hardcover of Planet
Hulk sells nearly 10k copies in the bookstores (wow!), and House
of M, Secret War, Fallen Son, and the first Bendis
Avengers trade all chart.
Second: “big name”
authors don’t seem to mean a ton for Marvel-in-the-Bookstores. While
Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men v2 & v3 both make the
cut-off, v1 doesn’t (and that’s wholly backwards from DC’s positioning
of multi-volume series, where v1 always sells best); and
both of Neil Gaiman’s books, Eternals (8109 copies) and 1602
(5773 copies) make the list, but the latter is down dramatically
from the 12k sold last year.
Third: the value
of the Ultimate line as an entry point to super-heroes seems to
be fading dramatically. Only one of the four Ultimates books
(Ultimates 2 v2) charts this year, and there are only two
Ultimate X-Men (v15 & 16), and three Spider-Man
(v1, 6, and 18) making the cut. No FF, or any of the secondary
books whatsoever make the Top 750 this year.
Marvel’s “evergreen”
list (titles that have charted every year since ’03) is now only
two items long (Ultimate Spider-Man v1, and v6). V1 is down
(5120 vs 7938), while v6 is up (8859 vs 5678)
Marvel’s core
superhero product seems to be largely flat to me in 2007 in the
Bookstores, and my guess is they won’t have a second Stephen King
hardcover out in 2008. The paperback (I guess?) may help them in
’08, but they probably aren’t going to have the same support via
Civil War, and World War Hulk isn’t likely to have
anything like the same impact as CW. I expect that next year’s
report will have them down, probably back to around 2006 levels.
The median average
of a Marvel book on this years chart is 10,187 copies, the mean
is 6753. Marvel placed one book over 50k (Dark Tower), three
over 20k (Anita Blake, Civil War, and Road to Civil
War), and seven under 5k. Marvel, as always, burns fast and
hot and quick.
For Everything
Else:
A huge gain in
this “category”, as maybe (possibly) “comics as a medium” starts
to come alive in the BookScan venues. 72 titles place for 828,484
pieces, and $13.7 million retail dollars.
Here’s a year-to-year
comparison chart:
Year |
# of placing titles |
Unit sales |
Dollar sales |
2003 |
32 |
95,355 |
$1,684,624 |
2004 |
36 |
230,831 |
$4,360,522 |
2005 |
39 |
435,178 |
$7,733,180 |
2006 |
48 |
486,135 |
$8,306,366 |
2007 |
72 |
828,484 |
$13,703,858 |
Lots and lots
to talk about in here, because this is the Defenders of categories
– it’s not really a category at all.
As we already
discussed, the Best-Seller in this category is Frank Miller’s 300,
with 72,328 copies sold, and an astounding $2.2 million in sales,
if they all sold at full retail – that’s a crazy big number, and
shows the ability of a film to sell a single-volume title. Someone
coming out of Spider-Man 3 might be interested in Spider-Man,
but the possible range of choices they have is enormous – they might
pick up an issue of one of the half-a-dozen Spider-Man comics, or
maybe one of the several score graphic novels, but their choice
is diffused over the sheer number of choices that exist. Not so
with something like 300 – if they’re interested in reading
300, they have exactly one choice.
On the other hand,
these are probably one-off sales, unlikely to be repeated, as now
that there’s no movie to promote them any longer. In 2006 300
sold 22,443 copies, and I’ll expect that in 2008 it will drop back
below 20k.
The second best-selling
book in this section is the color version of Jeff Smith’s Bone.
Volume 5, Rockjaw, to be specific, with 36,917 copies sold,
and v1, Out From Boneville, is right on its heels with 34,302
copies sold. These are exceptional performances, especially given
the reports of how well Bone has been performing in the Library
and Book Fair markets. It really couldn’t have happened to a nicer
guy.
What’s even more
striking about Bone’s success is that all six of the volumes
(v7 was released in early ’08) placed in the Top 10 of the “Everything
Else” books, selling, collectively, over 161k copies. That’s just
staggering.
Jeff also sells
15,252 copies of the Bone One edition, with everything included
in black & white. That’s published by Cartoon Books (instead
of Scholastic’s Graphix imprint), and so probably benefits him more
directly. I like the fact that the color and B&W editions don’t
seem to be negatively competing with one another.
The fourth best-selling
title in this section isn’t a comic at all (in the sense of “words
and pictures juxtaposed in a deliberate sequential yadda yadda”),
it is DK Publishing’s Marvel Encyclopedia. It would be nice
if these things got categorized correctly, but whatchugonnado? Either
way, it sold almost 31k copies, and at $40 a throw, that’s over
$1.2 million dollars.
In at #5 is the
first volume of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. That’s 28,771
copies sold. Persepolis v1 was the #1 book in this category
in 2006 (with 28,796 sold), so I think this one is going to stay
on the charts for a long time as a perennial. Next year, it is fairly
likely that this will go back to being the #1 book because of the
animated film, and the eventual home video release.
What’s much more
puzzling to me is that (just like last year), the second volume
of Persepolis sells substantially fewer copies – it
only manages to move 9909 copies, or just over a third. This baffles
me – is it because there isn’t consumer awareness that there’s more
to the story, or does the audience not like v1 (unlikely, in my
mind)? Or is there something else going on there? It just doesn’t
make sense.
This may be moot
next year because Random House has issued a Complete edition that
has both volumes. The Complete Persepolis sells 11,207 copies
this year, and is fairly likely to be the dominant version next
year. And, all the way down at the bottom of the “Everything Else”
list comes the boxed set of v1 & 2, with an additional 4516
copies. All combined, Persepolis shifts over 54k copies in
2007.
The tenth best-selling
“everything else” book is v1 of art spiegelman’s Maus, with
20,365 copies sold. V2 comes in with 12,296 copies sold, while the
boxed set of v1 & 2 moves 11,967 copies. The Complete Maus
HC doesn’t manage to make the Top 750 (selling only 3258 copies
down in the Long Tail.
Looking deeper
into the charts, in the Top 20 there’s a pretty diverse group of
comics. In order, and talking about titles that we didn’t discuss
above, we see Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel (17,057 copies
sold), based on the prose novel series, American Born Chinese
(17,008), Babymouse: Heartbreaker and Camp Babymouse
(15,550 and 12,756), Fun Home (15,256), Buffy the Vampire
Slayer: The Long Way Home (13,025), 30 Days of Night
[v1] (12,661), and Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (12,427)
A few notes on
this batch: Babymouse is aimed at the juvenile reader, but
in form and format, they are comics, and seven different Babymouse
books chart in the Top 750 – the only reason all eight released
ones didn’t chart is because v8 was released the week of Christmas.
(Diary of a
Wimpy Kid does not, however, appear anywhere on this chart,
before you ask – which I’d agree with, as it isn’t “comics” per
se, in my personal and humble opinion)
Fun Home and Making Comics both debuted
a year before – Fun Home sold 20,129 in 2006, while Making
Comics did 12,881 back then. I think the latter is an especially
good follow-through on an “academic” book.
Buffy, to me, is a disappointment, for much
the same reasons as delineated in the discussion about Dark
Tower in the Marvel section. As a periodical comic book, the
first issue of Buffy seems
to have sold at least 158,437 copies, or more than ten times
what the trade sold into the book market. To a certain degree, I’d
say that Buffy is the “civilian friendly” comic following
an extremely popular property with a rabid and dedicated fanbase
that is both well-connected and well-educated about availability.
And yet, against all conventional wisdom, the periodical performed
significantly better than the collection.
(Joss Whedon’s
other rabid-fanbase book, Serenity, scores 8699 copies
in 2007)
And 30 Days
of Night, I think it is fair to say, got its bounce from the
film of the same.
After this we
start getting into sub-10k sales in this category. A few call-outs:
Shaun Tan’s The
Arrival brings in 8720 copies sold, a very solid performance,
and one I expect will probably be duplicated in 2008 with the announcement
that it won the Grand
Priz at Angouleme this year.
Scholastic’s Graphix
imprint continues to do well with things that aren’t Bone
– Goosebumps lands two placing titles (v1 with 8808, and
v2 with 8267), while the Babysitter’s Club also does two
(v1 with 5019, and v2 with 6274)
IDW, in addition
to 30 Days of Night, places three other movie-related titles:
the TP of Transformers: The Movie (8463 copies), the Transformers
Movie Prequel TP (7987), and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend
(7912) – that last one was actually originally printed by Eclipse,
some 16 years ago!
The second Best
American Comics volume (this one edited by Chris Ware) comes
in with 8397 copies sold. The 2006 volume sold 12,859 copies that
year.
In the Surprise
Placing of 2007 category, The HC version of Archaia’s Mouse Guard:
Fall 1152 arrives with 8382 copies sold. I’ve noticed that the
paperback is not going to be published by ASP, but rather by Random
House imprint Villard, another sign of real world book publishers
cherry picking small press titles.
Image Comics manages
to get four listings, all of them Walking Dead. V1 hits 8076
copies, and is accompanied by v5 (5913), v6 (8192) and v7 (6168).
Top Cow also gets a listing with The Darkness Ultimate Collection
(5012)
The Adventures
of Tintin
(the 3-in-1 HC versions) manages to place three volumes this year
(last year only had one) – v1 (7607), v2 (5745), and v3 (4666)
Dark Horse, while
certainly greatly helped by the performance of 300, has a
bit of a comedown this year otherwise. Sin City v1 only shifts
7547 copies, while v2 moves 5601. V3 and up aren’t to be found in
the Top 750. In 2005, the seven volumes of Sin City collectively
sold 185,713 copies, while in 2006, only six charted, for 37,425
copies total. Now we’re down to 13,148 copies which actually surprises
me a great deal, as I would have expected some “tag along” coming
off of Miller’s 300. Apparently the market is saturated on
Sin City?
Dark Horse also
places 6979 copies of the Buffy Omnibus v1 (that collects
semi-continuity stories from the 90s, not the recent “Season Eight”
series – which makes that 50%-of look pretty darn good, actually),
as well as six Star Wars volumes – 6824 of Legacy
v1, 6494 of Knights of the Old Republic v1, 5108 of KOTR
v2, and three volumes of Clone Wars Adventures: v1 (5243),
v2 (4615) and v7 (6225). Like Sin City, this is a drop from
last year, but only by a hair in this case. In 2006, they sold 38,863
Star Wars books over seven titles, and in 2005 that was 88,978
over eight titles. I’m actually a little surprised the franchise
is staying as relatively strong as it has.
All told, including
their manga business, Dark Horse comes up with $4.5 million of action
of the Top 750. They only did $4.1 million in 2006, but bear in
mind that $2.2 million of this year’s total is all 300, baby,
and is unlikely to be repeated.
(Dark Horse’s
Long Tail in 2007 is $10.9 million dollars, by the way.)
Slave Labor, as
always, places both Johnny, the Homicidal Maniac (7400) and
Squee (5006). These are the only two books in the “everything
else” section that are “Evergreen” and have been on every list since
2003. Actually, I strongly suspect Maus was miscategorized
before 2006, and it otherwise would have been “evergreen”, but I
can only state with assurance data that I have! JTHM and Squee are
both down a smidge from last year (and the year before), but they
still have really excellent sales for decade-plus old work – sales
that many other brand new books would maim and kill for.
Top Shelf only
places Blankets this year for 5614 copies, again, slowly
declining, but envious none-the-less. Alan Moore’s Lost Girls,
which was the largest dollar book of last year in this section,
doesn’t appear on the 2007 Top 750, but looking deeper into the
Long Tail, I can see they shifted 4332 copies this year, and if
we rank the entire chart by dollars, rather than pieces, Lost
Girls suddenly becomes book #50 of the entire chart. (It was
#11 in dollars, total, last year)
And then we’re
down to the end of the charts: two volumes of W.I.T.C.H.
(v1 for 4997, v7 for 6800), 28 Days Later: The Aftermath
(5951), Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (5001), Forgotten
Realms v4 (4900), the graphic novel from the Redwall
prose series (4715), and right there at the bottom, Superman:
The Dailies 1939-1942 HC (4524 copies)
The only thing
I can add there is that Shortcomings there is the only Drawn
& Quarterly book to appear, and nor is there any Fantagraphics
book in the Top 750 – that means they shifted under ~4400. Now that
I can see the Long Tail, I can now confidently state that there’s
not much (if any) miscategorization that is causing that performance:
“Art Comics”, with the exception of a tiny handful of “anointed”
books, do not appear to be selling in the bookstore environment.
Remember that BookScan includes Amazon, and all major internet
retailers as well.
It further seems
to me that with approximately 7500 BookScan reporting venues, this
indicates that most book stores aren’t even bothering to
stock “Art comics” in the first place. Make of that what you will.
Regardless of
that, I still find Shortcomings’ performance to be poor given
the amount of press and attention the title garnered this year –
I absolutely expected at minimum a 50% better performance, and probably
a doubling.
To move towards
wrapping this up, we have our obligatory things-that-are-not-comics
on the list, with the we-see-it-every-year Bloody
Crown of Conan which, hey, they sell 5380 copies of – there’s
an increase from 2006! There’s also 7157 copies of the prose novel
Baltimore, 6782 copies of the Secrets of Spider-Man Revealed,
and 6261 copies of the Webster’s New World Children’s Dictionary.
Well, I guess it does have words and pictures!
Only seven “everything
else” books sold under 5k copies. Ten sold over 20k.
And that’s pretty
much what BookScan in 2007 looks like to these eyes.
So, how does the
DM compare to any of this? Well, that’s the million dollar question,
and mostly the answer is the usual “dunno, we’re comparing apples
to oranges”. Again, DM
sales reports are focused on sell-in, while BookScan reports
sell-through. DM sales reports only include Diamond, which, while
largely accurate for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image, potentially
are just a fraction of sales for publishers like Fantagraphics or
Drawn & Quarterly. Further, Diamond’s reports don’t actually
list sales figures, it lists an “order index” where sales are compared
to that month’s issue of Batman (the periodical). ICv2 appears
very confident that its numbers are accurate, but virtually every
publisher tells me they’re off by some factor.
To confuse things
more, Diamond doesn’t even provide “order index” figures for their
year-end reports. Just a straight list with no numbers attached.
Diamond’s year-end reports are available here on Newsarama. Follow
these links for 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and,
our subject this time, 2007. Another
problem is that Diamond’s lists are relatively short – only the
Top 100 for both comics and books. That’s not really enough to judge
a 750-item-strong list against.
Still, there’s
a certain amount of figuring it out that can be done. It is possible
to sum up ICv2’s
reports and try to draw certain conclusions from there. For
example (and I want to give a special thanks to John
Mayo for doing the heavy lifting for me this year and giving
me a single excel file with all of the ICv2 data within it!), let’s
play this thought experiment: not a single one of the December 2007
book release’s show on the end of the year
Top 100. The highest charting 12/07 book is Chronicles of
Wormwood: The Last Enemy which ICv2
calculates as selling 6023 copies. Therefore, the bottom of
the year-end chart can’t possibly be less than 6024 copies, right?
(Actually, I’d
be more sure of that as a definite conclusion if I hadn’t noticed
that Marvel’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures
HC, which was released in July of 2007, and sold at least 13,506
copies cumulatively, charting in four different months [July, August,
October, and December], but doesn’t appear on the end-of-the-year
Top 100 at all. My guess in that case is that Diamond didn’t add
the 1st and 2nd printings together, but who
can be certain?)</span
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