The Comichron: The Blog of The Comics Chronicles

The big picture: Bookscan, comics shops, and a $680 million year

2012-02-10T19:03:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

As in past years, Brian Hibbs has gotten access to the actual sales for trade paperbacks and graphic novels in 2011 as recorded by Bookscan, a service of Nielsen. I encourage readers to take a look at Hibbs's article and see how the figures break down.

Bookscan draws upon cash-register data from many member bookstores — and from Amazon — and its share of industry sales on individual titles varies. The service reportedly covers something like 70% of bookstore sales, but that varies depending on the item. Thanks to Amazon offering Bookscan figures to creators, we're able to compare them with known sales to get a sense of what's in and what's out; from what I've seen, that 70% is a reasonable estimate, but I don't have enough data to draw from to say for sure.

So the list comprises a big chunk of bookstore sales. Does it cover all items? Pretty much, yes, with reports for more than 24,000 items going all the way down to single copies. My own spot-check found a few significant titles that should have been in the file but weren't, but I do not have a big enough sample to say how comprehensive the list is. For discussion purposes, figure that the list gives us maybe three-quarters of all sales outside comics shops for graphic novels and manga. So how'd they do?

Hibbs finds that the top 750 items, once non-comics items are weeded out, sold for $79,961,951 at full retail; that's down 8.5% from last year, just in that grouping. On the other hand, the list of items in the "long tail" grew again, and it adds about $95 million to the overall total; that brings the overall amount to $175 million.

Armed with that, as in past years, I have calculated an "all-industry number. Here's how it works.

We start with the two figures we already know about 2011. The Top 300 trade paperbacks for every month in 2011 had sales of $70 million in comics shops — and sales for all trades in the Direct Market were probably closer to $150 million. We also already know that the Top 300 Comics each month accounted for $248 million of Diamond's $417 million in sales; periodicals not in the Top 300 and magazines would have accounted for the remaining $20 million or so.

Now we go to the mass market. Taking Hibbs' figures, we have around $175 million in Bookscan outlets for graphic novels. That may be high, depending on how much of the long tail of that table still has non-comics items in it; but let's take it as is. If Bookscan is three-quarters of the market or so, that could mean there's another $50 million or so in graphic novel sales outside Bookscan.

So all told, that's about $225 million in graphic novels and trade paperbacks outside the comics shops — and $375 million in trades altogether. This means that trades are pulling in more money than comic books, right?

Yes, but there's some outlets for comic books we have yet to add. Comics are still sold through newsstands, although the percentage is falling; looking at Marvel and Archie's Statements of Ownership, I would guess there could be $30-35 million in newsstand sales not covered in the Diamond charts. And finally — and almost always forgotten — are subscription sales, which could bring in another $3-5 million.

Between those sales and the sales inside comics shops, periodicals would be doing something near to $305 million. Comic books are still king in comics shops, where they're nearly 60% of the trade — but they are closer to 45% of all comics and graphic novel dollars, if Hibbs' Bookscan estimates are correct.

So, that gives us, fusing everyone's estimates with a fudge factor involved:

Direct Market Comics, Trades, GNs, and Magazines (Comichron): $417 million

Mass Market Trades and GNs (Hibbs/Bookscan): around $225 million

Newsstand Comics (Comichron/USPS): around $35 million

Subscription Comics (Comichron/USPS): $5 million

Comic book and trade paperback sales in North America: $660-690 million

And that's where you get the largest figure that's on the Yearly Sales table here. The Direct Market is 60% of the overall market for comics, and nearly twice the size of the bookstore market when it comes to comics material.

Note, it does not include two important groupings. Diamond UK sells about 10% again its U.S. direct market sales of comics and graphic novels to comics shops in the United Kingdom — so that's another $40 million or so that publishers here realize. This may or may not expand out to the UK bookstore market the same way, given rights issues, but if it did, the United Kingdom could add $60 million or more to the U.S. total, meaning U.S. print products are bringing in three quarters of a billion dollars annually.

And that doesn't get into digital sales at all.

The biggest question marks above have to do with the portion of the mass market outside Bookscan, first and foremost — and then the size of the newsstand market. The Direct Market figures are pretty solid, comparatively. These calculations are very rough, and subject to revision as I get more data. But the point is that the comics market is a lot bigger than what's just in comics shops — and it's larger than many probably imagine.

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Uncle Scrooge -- only the best-seller of the 1960s!

2012-02-09T22:06:00.007-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

I've been adding quite a lot of Statement of Ownership data to the Comichron database for an update coming soon; the list of titles I have information for in 1960 has more than doubled in length since my initial post here. It's all coming soon, but for an early taste, I've added a full Title Spotlight page for the #1 title of 1960 — Uncle Scrooge, created by Carl Barks for Disney. I have full data for all but a couple of years — see it here.

Uncle Scrooge was an original creation for comics, first appearing in a Donald Duck story before getting three issues of Dell's Four Color Comics. Those three issues were the start of a series that continued from Dell into the 1960s, before changing to Western Publishing's Gold Key and, later, Whitman labels.

The series was quarterly as it entered the 1960s, and its sales of just over a million copies per issue was indeed enough for the top spot; only Walt Disney's Comics & Stories also topped 1 million, also in 1960.

Not counting Mad, no other American comic book would sell more than a million copies until Star Wars #1, in 1977 — and no comics title has ever had more copies reported sold in its annual Statement of Ownership. Marvel's adjectiveless X-Men series topped out just under 1 million when its first average was figured, though X-Men #1 from 1991 remains the best-selling American comic book of all time.

We see Uncle Scrooge data up until 1972, when Gold Key gave up on second-class subscriptions — but the figures would return to the title in the 1980s when Gladstone revived it. Disney took over for a while, and then Gladstone took it back — and subscriptions and statements continued. I don't believe there were statements in the Gemstone or Boom issues of the 2000s; if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know. Likewise, I have not ruled out the existence of forms for 1990 and 1992, which would have appeared in issues early in those years; these were during publisher transitions so it is possible they may not exist. But if anyone has them, drop me a line at my contact address on the left of this page.

It's meaningful, I think, that the best-seller of the 1960s should come from Barks, whose work was originally uncredited and who was known originally to fans as "the Good Duck Artist." Fandom in the 1960s was bringing attention to a lot of people who had previously been unheralded, and Barks is a great example. He changed comics — and now comics were changing.

Update: I was asked over on Facebook (where you can follow Comichron) why the title suffered such a steep decline in 1963, falling more than half a million copies from 1961, the last year we had figures for. (In the transition to Gold Key, the publisher decided to only print subscription sales for its line in 1962 — an error fixed in 1963.) There are a few possibilities for the drop that come to mind.

With its own distribution network, Dell's reach was vast. The title's sales were almost certainly more than a million in 1958 and 1959. Dell was not audited by ABC so it's not easy to know, but my sense is it was less impacted by the Code than the publishers of other titles. By 1963, though, it wasn't Dell any more, but Gold Key — and if that involved a shift to the regular Independent Distributor networks, that could account for a major difference there. Uncle Scrooge had also gone from four times a year to six, which could have had an impact on print runs and orders — and just before that, I really think Dell's mistiming of the market by going to 15¢ was ultimately ruinous when the rest of the market went to 12¢. There may be other reasons, but it's worth noting that Gold Key saw these drops pretty much across the board, so I don't think it's necessarily endemic to Scrooge.

January 2012 comics sales estimates online

2012-02-06T16:09:00.000-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

In comics, the month of January has often stolen the life from whatever good things were going on in the trade, saleswise, so it is usually good enough when we can say that the first month of the year didn't foul the nest. This January, however, seems to have been a good one for the Direct Market, though we must look past the comparatives with last January to see it. Click to see the comics order estimates for January 2012.

Last January had 23% fewer new items on the market as publishers adjusted to Diamond's shift to Tuesday shipping — and just as I advised against putting too much stock into the market's relative decline that month, I caution against taking the year-to-year change figures below too seriously, either. But when we look back earlier, we see that this month's Top 300 comics combined not only sold more copies than the grouping last January, but also more copies than January 2010 and January 2009 as well. That 2009 month was memorable for the publication of the top-selling comic book of the 21st Century so far, the Barack Obama commemorative issue of Amazing Spider-Man, but the market still this January still ordered 15,000 more comic books than it did that month.

The case can be made that the 2012 sales picture is healthier in some respects, as the unit sales are more evenly distributed, thanks to the DC relaunch; as I mentioned at the time, the Obama issue was about all the market had going for it that winter, early in the comics recession. The 300th-place title this month had orders of 2,606 copies, which would have placed it at 266th in January 2009. (See the complete list of 300th place titles.)

Led by Justice League #5, DC titles took the top ten slots this month, and my hunch would be that this is the first time that has happened in the history of comics. Even in the 1960s, there were other contenders — Dell and Archie, among others — keeping DC from a complete lock on the top tier month-in and month-out. For total chart-topping domination, however, the most remarkable case probably remains March 2005, in which Marvel had 23 out of the top 24 regularly-priced comics. (Click to see the complete list of 1st place titles.)

Regardless of its comparative positioning on the comics charts, however, it's noteworthy that Marvel's combined comics and trade paperback dollar orders in the Top 300s actually increased slightly versus December, whereas the market as a whole sold $1.5 million less in comics and trades in the Top 300s. So it's not always about chart placement. This month, a single product like the Fear Itself hardcover is the top-line equivalent of more than 40,000 comics units.

The aggregate totals:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES

January 2012: 5.78 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: +31%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -14%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -1%
Versus 15 years ago this month: -35%

ALL COMICS UNIT SALES
January 2012 versus one year ago this month: +33.56%

---

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES

January 2012: $19.82 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +29%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -5%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +18%
Versus 15 years ago this month: -9%

ALL COMICS DOLLAR SALES
January 2012 versus one year ago this month: +32.05%

---

TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

January 2012: $5.97 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +30%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -9%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: -46%

ALL TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
January 2012 versus one year ago this month: +18.38%

---

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

January 2012: $25.8 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +29%
Versus 5 years ago this month, counting just the Top 100 TPBs: -6%
Versus 10 years ago this month, counting just the Top 25 TPBs: +9%

ALL COMICS AND TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
January 2012 versus one year ago this month: +27.47%

---

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)

January 2012: approximately $32.54 million (subject to revision)
Versus 1 year ago this month: +30%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -3%

Trade paperbacks and graphic novels saw a year-over-year boost thanks in part to the Batman: Through The Looking Glass hardcover. It does appear that the frontlist had a better month than the backlist, as the Top 300 trades were up 30% year-over-year, while the entire list was only up 18%. A hardcover selling a lot of copies would contribute to that effect. The January 2002 figure was so much higher than 2012 in part because of Alternative's 9-11 Emergency Relief title, which sold over 12,000 copies in preorder.
The average comic book in the Top 300 cost $3.51; the average comic book retailers ordered cost $3.43. The median price for comics offered crept up to $3.50, a figure not seen in several months — but $2.99 is the most common price offered.

As noted here earlier, February will be unusual in that it has five shipping Wednesdays, something that only happens ever 28 years. In the longer term, the question will continue to be whether publishers can continue to prime the pump following the DC relaunch. The Before Watchmen promotion will surely help — it will be interesting to see how the figures compare to what we know of sales from the series the first time around.

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Best January since 2008 for comics orders

2012-02-03T16:47:00.003-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

On a day in which the United States celebrated a very good jobs report and the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at its highest level since the financial crisis began, it is perhaps fitting that that we have a report for comics sales in January that doesn't make people sick. It would, in fact, be stellar — if last January hadn't been artificially depressed by Diamond Comic Distributors' change to Tuesday shipping, which resulted in many fewer items being released. Still, the figures for January are very good news, working out to around $32.75 million, by my initial estimates, which would make it the best January since 2008. Click here to see the preliminary rankings for January 2012 comics sales.

The month of January has traditionally been horrible, sapping any energy built up in the previous year. But the slide from December — 6.25% in overall dollars — is the smallest that we've seen since, again, 2008, before the comics recession and the general recession began. The year-over-year increases of 33.56% in comics unit sales, 32.05% in comics dollar sales, 18.38% in graphic novel sales, 27.47% in overall dollars are great big numbers that should and will always be seen with an asterisk because of last January's issues. We sold about $7 million more in comics and trades this year partially because there were more comics and trades to sell. But we're only off less than $2 million from December, and that bodes well.

The DC relaunch effects are certainly a contributing factor; Justice League #6 led the market. The Batman: Through the Looking Glass hardcover was also a help, topping the graphic novel chart. A milder winter in many parts of the U.S. probably also helped. Marvel and DC split the market share lead this month, with Marvel leading the unit shares and DC topping the dollar share side of things.

It's also interesting to look at what role cover price declines are having. The Top 100 comics had an average price of $3.35, down a quarter from last January's overall average. But the comics unit and dollar sales are correlating more closely, which suggests that the typical books sold are priced closer to the mean.

Here are the aggregate changes:

COMPARATIVE SALES STATISTICS

	DOLLARS	UNITS
JANUARY 2012 VS. DECEMBER 2011
COMICS	-7.01%	-8.93%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-4.51%	-4.86%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-6.25%	-8.65%
JANUARY 2012 VS. JANUARY 2011
COMICS	32.05%	33.56%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	18.38%	8.46%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	27.47%	31.38%

And the market shares:

TOP COMIC BOOK PUBLISHERS

PUBLISHER	DOLLAR SHARE	UNIT SHARE
MARVEL COMICS	35.17%	37.51%
DC COMICS	33.55%	39.86%
IMAGE COMICS	5.48%	4.83%
DARK HORSE COMICS	4.89%	3.55%
IDW PUBLISHING	4.35%	3.78%
DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT	3.46%	3.66%
BOOM! STUDIOS	1.66%	1.35%
EAGLEMOSS PUBLICATIONS LTD	1.47%	0.30%
VIZ MEDIA	0.92%	0.42%
RANDOM HOUSE	0.79%	0.18%
OTHER NON-TOP 10	8.26%	4.57%

So the news is good — but we won't know how good for a while. We shouldn't look to February for much comparative clarity — it's got five Wednesdays. There hasn't been one since 1984 and won't be another until 2040. I will not make a prediction about what the industry will look like then!

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Diamond Comic Distributors marks 30 years

2012-02-02T12:22:00.000-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

I missed the actual date yesterday but on Feb. 1, Diamond Comic Distributors — the sales agent for most large comics publishers to comics shops in North America — celebrated its 30th anniversary.

Steve Geppi, today

When Steve Geppi began distributing comics and related merchandise to fellow shop owners on Feb. 1, 1982, the comic book Direct Market was still fairly new. Phil Seuling began selling Marvel and DC comics non-returnably to comics shops in 1975, later incorporating with partner Jonni Levas as Sea Gate Distributors. Geppi was already in the business as a retailer at that time: he had left his job as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in 1974 to open his first shop, Geppi's Comic World, which operated out of the basement of a TV repair shop.

While his company formally began service as Diamond on Feb. 1, 1982, it had one warehouse and 17 customers — Geppi had already been doing work on the distribution side having taken over operations for New Media Irjax's Boston and Tampa distribution centers, according to the corporate timeline. There began, then, a long association with the comics industry. Many retailers have been customers from the beginning, and several publishers have been selling through it from the start. Geppi also
recognized in a press release the contributions of many of his longtime employees. "I am deeply grateful to all of them for their hard work, and I am honored to work alongside them." Diamond Executive Vice President and COO Chuck Parker has been with the company for 27 years, for example.

Chuck Parker

"Steve Geppi has long been synonymous with comic book distribution," said Parker. "His enthusiasm and passion for comic books and pop culture in general, coupled with a retailer’s background, gave Steve a unique and insightful appreciation of what a successful distributor must do in order to achieve."

So Diamond has been a huge part of the story of comics for a generation. It was already the #1 distributor when I entered the business side of comics, just before the tumultuous times of the mid-1990s that left Diamond the only full-line distribution company standing. I've had many positive experiences with the company, first as a working journalist, and now as a comic-book creator. And of course, as a historian archiving the past of the comics market here for The Comics Chronicles.

Steve Geppi in 1992, for Diamond's 10th anniversary

On that score, I should also note as a historical matter Diamond's long publication history. Diamond's Previews began to evolve from a simple listing into its more familiar catalog form 1988; Diamond Dialogue was being published as a newsletter at that point, but was already including some of the sales chart data that this site archives today. I hope to get more of the early stuff online in the future. While there is no longer a print retailer monthly, Diamond continues to release the sales charts each month on its website — so this is yet another tradition that's continued for a quarter of a century.

Diamond provided a historical timeline, which I have excerpted parts of below; I will get some of this on the timeline section of the site eventually.

1974: Steve Geppi opens Geppi’s Comic World, which operated out of the basement of a TV repair shop.

1982: Geppi founds Diamond Comic Distributors with one warehouse and 17 retail customers.

1988: Diamond goes national with the acquisition of Bud Plant.

1990: Diamond acquires selected assets of Seattle based distributor Destiny Distribution and takes over the operations of Oregon’s Second Genesis.

1991: Diamond UK, Ltd. begins operations in the U.K., leading to the acquisition of England based distributor Pacific Distribution, Ltd.

1992: Diamond’s Star System, which will evolve into the Previews Backlist Service, begins operation, giving retailers access to thousands of graphic novels and trade paperbacks.

1993: Diamond acquires England-based Titan Distributors Ltd., consolidates U.K. operations and becomes Diamond Comic Distributors (UK).

1994: Diamond acquires selected assets of New York-based distributor Comics Unlimited, Ltd.

1995: DC, Image, Dark Horse, and Acclaim choose Diamond to be their exclusive sales agent to comic specialty retailers.

1996: Diamond acquires selected assets of its largest competitor, Capital City Distribution. It also launches the toll-free Comic Shop Locator Service.

1997: Marvel signs an exclusive agreement with Diamond to service specialty market retailers. Diamond centralizes its customer service program and adds an Order Adjustment program,

1998: Diamond Online’s Retailer Services Area, the forerunner of today’s Retailer Services Website, goes live. Online ordering becomes available two years later.

1999: Diamond’s Vendor Services Website opens.

2000: Selected assets and liabilities of Alliance Games Distribution are purchased; Alliance Game Distributors eventually becomes a major operating division of Diamond. Diamond starts the Diamond Bookshelf program for librarians and educators.

2001: Through Alliance, certain assets of West Coast distributors Berkeley Distributors and Barchetta Distribution are acquired. Online reordering becomes available on the Retailer Services site.

2002: Diamond teams with retailers and publishers for the first Free Comic Book Day, designed to attract new customers to comic shops and expose them to what comics has to offer. The Diamond Daily e-newsletter begins. Diamond Book Distributors is founded to service the growing demand for comics and graphic novels in the book trade.

2004: The first Final Order Cut-off Form is posted on Diamond’s Retailer Services Website, allowing retailers to place orders up until the publisher sets its print run.

2005: Diamond opens its Memphis Distribution Center.

2007: Diamond’s ComicSuite Point-of-Sale software is announced.

2008: PREVIEWSWorld.com debuts on the web. Diamond’s Olive Branch Distribution Center opens with 600,000 square feet of space and a high-tech Warehouse Management System.

2010: Diamond launches kidscomics.com to direct young readers and their parents to kid-friendly comic shops across the United States and Canada.

2011: Diamond launches Day-Early Delivery.

And more to come...

News archives restored

2012-01-17T19:42:00.000-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Two months from today marks five years online for The Comics Chronicles, and while I've gotten a lot of comics history on the site in that time, some of the site's own history has been absent. A database crash in August 2008 took out all the blog posts from before that time, and while I had access to them, I was more focused on getting new stuff online. But now most blog posts have been restored, right back to the first one in March, 2007. Readers framing forward will see the site got quickly into posting new figures, which at the time meant the end of Marvel's Civil War and the death of Captain America.

There aren't many essays in this material that haven't been reposted later, but there are some thoughts on speculation and sales charts and the end-of-year post for 2007, a very big year for the business. Some of the external links may not be functional, of course.

I did write pieces on the state of the market every month going back to 1994 which might be interesting to get online here in the future, but there are other priorities first.

2000 for 2011: Top 1000 Comics and Top 1000 Trades, with Comichron estimates

2012-01-11T12:44:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Diamond Comic Distributors has released its lists of Top Comics and Top Trade Paperbacks and graphic novels for 2011, and as I did the last two years I have combined that information with my own estimates of aggregated sales of comics and trades throughout the year and other information to project longer lists, with estimates: the Top Thousand Comics and the Top Thousand Graphic Novels for 2011.

Again, it’s a fairly large page given the number of items, but I am reluctant to fission off trades to a separate page. I have rounded each entry to the nearest hundred copies, as before.

The Top Thousand Comics account for at least 47 million copies, or well over half of all the comics that Diamond sold. Last year, the Top 1000 amounted to 45.3 million copies. In full retail dollars, they sold for $161.3 million, slightly more than last year’s $160 million. The Top Thousand Trades went for $58.4 million, a drop from last year’s $64 million. That’s consistent with what we know about the year in general: comics up, trades down. Combined, these two lists alone account for around half the orders by dollars Diamond received in publishing last year.

Justice League #1 was the top seller for the year, with more than 230,000 copies sold to North American retailers across several printings. Note that Diamond did not combine the Combo Pack orders with the main entry, as they were differently priced; estimates for the Combo Pack for #1 brings the total number of copies of the issue in the Direct Market closer to 255,000 copies. Yes, this figure differs from one that was recently mentioned in a recent interview with DC, which put the number of copies shipped at just over 361,000. I believe that calculation must include European sales of the U.S. version through Diamond UK, which would be at least 10% again what the North American Numbers were; it also likely includes the number of copies shipped to the newsstand.

Who published the Top Thousand Comics? Here's the breakdown:

Marvel: 539

DC: 434

Image: 16

Dark Horse: 6

IDW: 3

Dynamite: 2

That’s a slight drop for Marvel and an increase of 28 entries for DC.

And here's the publisher breakdown of the Top Thousand Graphic Novels:

DC: 339

Marvel: 300

Dark Horse: 103

Image: 68

Viz: 32

Random House: 13

IDW: 24

Boom: 17

Hachette: 12

Archie: 12

Dynamite: 11

Oni: 11

Avatar: 9

Not a lot of change there: DC lost a few entries and Marvel added a few. Assorted others accounted for the rest.

Within the Top Comics list for the year, we find the following breakdowns for unit sales:

42 comics had orders of over 100,000 copies in 2011

85 comics had orders of 75,000-99,999 copies in 2010

342 comics had orders of 50,000-74,999 copies in 2010

978 comics had orders of 25,000-49,999 copies in 2010

This represents a big boost over the volumes seen across the board in 2010, seen here:

26 comics had orders of over 100,000 copies in 2010

68 comics had orders of 75,000-99,999 copies in 2010

209 comics had orders of 50,000-74,999 copies in 2010

648 comics had orders of 25,000-49,999 copies in 2010

I only ran the Top 500 comics in 2009, so we can only comparing the top three categories directly:

39 comics had orders of over 100,000 copies in 2009

80 comics had orders of 75,000-99,999 copies in 2009

260 comics had orders of 50,000-74,999 copies in 2009

I have split up the Top Comics of the Century up into two different pages: one for the Top Comics for the Decade of the 2000s and one for Top Comics From 2000 Forward. The 2010 and 2011 entries have been incorporated into the latter — and we find that 24 comics from 2011 made the Top 300 for the century. That’s an improvement over 2010, in which only nine issues would have made the list, and none higher than 51st place. Justice League #1 places 13th for the century — and note that on this one chart I did include known Combo Pack sales for all the issues that had them.

The average price of comics in Diamond's Top 1,000 comics for 2010 was $3.37; the median price was $2.99. Last year, the mean for the Top 500 was $3.52, with a median price of $3.99. In 2009, the mean for the Top 500 was $3.42, with a median price of $2.99.

There are 20 other years of Diamond annual reports on the site, going back to 1991.

That does it for 2011. On to 2012!

Diamond releases Top 10s, market shares for 2011

2012-01-10T15:52:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

And in advance of the release of the larger lists for 2011, Diamond has released the Top 10 Comic Books and Trade Paperbacks of the year, plus the market shares.

The Top 10 Comics for the year are not surprisingly dominated by the DC relaunch:

RANK	DESCRIPTION	PRICE	PUBLISHER
1	Justice League #1	$3.99	DC
2	Batman #1	$2.99	DC
3	Action Comics #1	$3.99	DC
4	Justice League #2	$3.99	DC
5	Batman #2	$2.99	DC
6	Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #160	$3.99	Marvel
7	Green Lantern #1	$2.99	DC
8	Justice League #3	$3.99	DC
9	Action Comics #2	$3.99	DC
10	Detective Comics #1	$2.99	DC

And here are the top trade paperbacks, led by the second repeat leader in four years, Walking Dead Vol. 1:

RANK	DESCRIPTION	PRICE	PUB.
1	Walking Dead Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye	$9.99	Image
2	Walking Dead Vol. 14: No Way Out	$14.99	Image
3	League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: Century #2 1969	$9.95	Top Shelf
4	Walking Dead Vol. 15: We Find Ourselves	$14.99	Image
5	Walking Dead Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us	$14.99	Image
6	Fables Vol. 16: Rose Red	$17.99	DC
7	Batman: Noel Deluxe Edition	$22.99	DC
8	Walking Dead Vol. 3: Safety Behind Bars	$14.99	Image
9	Walking Dead Vol. 13: Too Far Gone	$14.99	Image
10	Morning Glories Vol. 1: For a Better Future	$9.99	Image

Marvel topped DC by several points in both units and dollars this year, although DC made up a great deal of ground in the second half of the year.

PUBLISHER	DOLLAR MARKET SHARE	UNIT MARKET SHARE
Marvel	37.29%	40.93%
DC	31.41%	36.77%
Image	5.27%	4.71%
IDW	4.73%	3.78%
Dark Horse	4.71%	3.35%
Dynamic Forces	3.06%	2.85%
Boom	1.73%	1.43%
Viz	1.09%	0.47%
Eaglemoss	0.96%	0.23%
Avatar	0.79%	0.54%
Other	8.95%	4.93%

A reminder that these calculations include not just comics and trade paperbacks, but also magazines: that's where Eaglemoss comes in. Eaglemoss sells magazines with action figures, which explains why its unit share is so much less than its dollar share — the price points are higher than the average price point on the list.

As discussed yesterday in the end-of-year report, retailers paid Diamond close to $188 million for the $417 million or so items represented above. You can apply the publishers' shares to these figures to guesstimate their own revenue — remember that Diamond would keep several percentage points from what it received.

Full top-sellers lists from the year coming soon.

Retailers bought at least 3 million more comics in 2011

2012-01-09T14:24:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Diamond Comic Distributors has released the full report for last month, and it completes the picture for the year for comics sales to North American comics shops. Click to see the sales estimates for December 2011.

As reported here on Friday, sales of periodical comics to comics shops went up during the year: sales of issues ranking in Diamond's Top 300 each month increased by nearly 3 million copies, to 72.13 million for the year. Getting back above 70 million in 2002 was a major step in the in industry recovery in the 2000s. Dollar sales within the Top 300 went up nearly $3 million for the year, a fact made more important because cover prices dropped in the year.

That's right: The average price of comic books dropped by about a dime in 2011. The average cost of all 3,600 comic books appearing in all twelve monthly Top 300 lists was $3.49, down from $3.58. The average price of comics ordered by retailers within that grouping was $3.44, down from $3.55. (Click to see the table for average prices each month.) It is the first annual drop in either category since 2003, and it represents two factors: price drops by some publishers, particularly DC, earlier in the year; and also the weighting of the Top 300 toward DC in the fall with the DC relaunch. Average prices ticked up in December, for example, to $3.55 ($3.45 weighted); that's not so much a reflection of a rise in prices as it is a reflection of DC's smaller presence in the Top 300 as more of its reordered relaunch issues dropped out of the tables.

The trade paperback category suffered in comparison with 2011, but not by much: the Top 300 trades and graphic novels each month went for $70 million, down from $76.3 million last year. That accounted for the entire shortfall for the year when comics and trades were combined; that total dropped from $322 million to $318.5 million in 2011. Essentially, had trades simply remained flat, the year would have been up by as much as it was down — a figure less than 1%.

It's also noteworthy that the Top 300 trades were off 8% for the year, while the overall trade category was off 5%. That indicates that sales were better in the "long tail," which grows longer every year as long as Diamond has shelf spaces for the individual books.

The aggregate figures:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
December 2011: 6.16 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: +11%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -12%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +8%
Versus 15 years ago this month: -40%
4th Quarter 2011: 20.76 million copies, +23% vs. 2010
2011 Year-End: 72.13 million copies, +4% vs. 2010, -12% vs. 2006, +8% vs. 2001

ALL COMICS UNIT SALES
December 2011 versus one year ago this month: +11.83%
2011 Year-End: +4.57%

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TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES

December 2011: $21.25 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -7%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +2%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +36%
4th Quarter 2011: $70.95 million, +16% vs. 2010
2011 Year-End: $248.44 million, +1% vs. 2010, -1% vs. 2006, +33% vs. 2001

ALL COMICS DOLLAR SALES
December 2011 versus one year ago this month: +2.66%
2011 Year-End: +1.16%

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TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

December 2011: $6.06 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -7%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +2%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +36%
4th Quarter 2011: $19 million, -9% vs. 2010
2011 Year-end: $70.06 million, -8% vs. 2010

ALL TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
December 2011 versus one year ago this month: -16.2%
2010 Year-End: -5.01%

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TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

December 2011: $27.3 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +2%
Versus 5 years ago this month, counting just the Top 100 TPBs: -2%
Versus 10 years ago this month, counting just the Top 25 TPBs: +19%
4th Quarter 2011: $89.95 million, +9% vs. 2010
2011 Year-end: $318.5 million, -1% vs. 2010

ALL COMICS AND TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
December 2011 versus one year ago this month: -3.94%
2011 Year-End: -0.89%

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OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)

December 2011: approximately $34.71 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -4%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +3%
4th Quarter 2011: $116.24 million, +9% vs. 2010
2011 Year-end: $417.07 million, -1% vs. 2010

Those quarterly change figures are notable: comics units and dollars were up double digits in the fourth quarter, and total revenues nearly were.

Updates have been made to the Yearly Comics Sales tables, so you can see the numbers from the last decade with 2011 included now. Note that the total for the largest category, which includes newsstand and bookstore sales, is speculative; we won't know until more Bookscan reports surface how much that market was impacted by the closure of Borders.

Diamond has more end-of-year data to release, but the question always is whether the Dead Quarter will steal energy from the market, as it often does. It may not be very easy to tell for sure, because last January was anomalously low because of Diamond's recalibration of its shipping dates. In the meantime, updates have been made here to the Top Sellers by Month and 300th Place Title by Month tables, bringing them up to date for the end of the year.

UPDATE: The best-sellers of the year are now online.

More comics sold in 2011, but trade weakness contributes to slightly off year

2012-01-06T15:59:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

It was close — very close. Comic books did what they were expected to do in December — but trade paperback novels do what they often do in December, resulting in overall comic book and trade paperback dollar orders finishing 2011 down by less than 1%, according to Diamond Comic Distributors. Click to see the Top 100 comics and trade paperbacks for the month.

December is historically a schizophrenic month in the comic book direct market. Sometimes, we find publishers loading the end of the year up with multiple comic book releases, trying to bring their budgets into line. December 2008 was enormous. The top-selling comic book of 1997, Darkness #11, came out on the very last ship-date of the year. On the other hand, there have been Decembers where publishers didn't try to do much at all in the closing weeks of the year — and in one recent year, Diamond was even closed between Christmas and New Year's. Another year saw horrible weather pushing shipments into the next calendar year. December is full of variety, at least as the sales charts go.

But one common theme has tended to be that November steals trade paperback orders from December. The reasons are obvious, as retailers begin stocking up for the holiday shopping season. Since 2000, Diamond's orders for its top trade paperbacks have dropped, on average, 21% in dollars from November to December. So while November's market move made it look very promising that the Direct Market would finish 2011 ahead overall for the first time since 2008, periodicals were going to have to carry a lot of the weight. And while total new comics sales were up for the month, it wasn't enough to offset the 16% year-over-year decline in trade paperback orders for the month.

So the year finishes off by a small amount, 0.89% in the widest category. But comics, driven greatly by the DC relaunch, rebounded in the year, up 4.57% in units and 1.16% in dollars. Trades finished off only 5.01% in dollar terms — and that made the difference. We can sort of see what happened by looking at trade paperback units, which were off by a wider margin, 11.64% for the year; we recall that 2010 was dominated by sales of Walking Dead and Scott Pilgrim, books priced lower on average than other trade paperbacks.

It is also worth noting that the average comic book cost considerably less in 2011 than it did in 2010, and while that pumped up unit sales, it could easily have contributed to the shortfall in overall dollars. It is also the case that not all comics that retailers received in 2011 have been recorded as sold by Diamond, because of the ongoing returnability of DC relaunch titles; that makes some difference, although, by my estimates, not enough to flip the year positive on its own.

Here are the aggregate totals for December:

COMPARATIVE SALES STATISTICS

	DOLLARS	UNITS
DECEMBER 2011 VS. NOVEMBER 2011
COMICS	-14.45%	-12.29%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-21.17%	-19.27%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-16.62%	-12.81%
DECEMBER 2011 VS. DECEMBER 2010
COMICS	2.66%	11.83%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-16.20%	-21.44%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-3.94%	8.66%
YEAR 2011 VS. YEAR 2010
COMICS	1.16%	4.57%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-5.01%	-11.64%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-0.89%	3.12%
FOURTH QUARTER 2011 VERSUS THIRD QUARTER 2011
COMICS	7.82%	8.39%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-0.85%	-5.57%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	5.10%	7.34%
FOURTH QUARTER 2011 VERSUS FOURTH QUARTER 2010
COMICS	16.69%	25.08%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	-5.75%	-18.08%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	9.01%	20.89%

Now, as to figuring out the total sales for the year, there is still some work to be done. I mentioned last month that Diamond's month-to-month percentage change figures in 2011 were squaring up perfectly with its reported year-to-date change. The reported change percentages for the individual quarters of 2010 and 2011 also square up with the predicted values, based on the monthly changes.

Bringing all the year-to-year changes that Diamond has reported each month into a model with all the monthly changes, however, causes some minor problems. Using all the aggregate change figures Diamond has released (and correcting for the publication error in November 2010), the model tells us that 2011 should only be off 0.3% or so from 2010, not 0.89%. Since the reported monthly and quarterly changes are internally consistent, one conclusion would be that couple of the year-to-year percentage changes Diamond reported earlier in 2011 are very slightly off — January 2011, which was a complicated month anyway, appears to be one of them. What all that this means is that if you plug in any figure for the end-of-year sales for 2011, the component months will not derive a 2010 that was better by exactly 0.89% — all the numbers net out to a 0.3% loss this year. There's nothing to be done about this, really; my expectation is that the 2012 math and the 2011 math will square up better.

Taking one major publisher's total sales in 2010 and dividing by its end-of-year market share finds that Diamond's wholesale comics and trade orders amounted to $184.7 million. The full retail figure for 2010 was probably around $419 million, if we assume that everything Diamond sold to all its customers at different discount tiers went for an average discount rate of around 56%. (The major publisher in question nets out to 57.6%, so that seems about right, given that smaller publisher discounts tend to be smaller on average.)

So using the Diamond-reported end-of-year change figure, this year's wholesale total is just over $183 million, which, if we use that same 56% rate, lands 2011 at $416 million, or off about $3 million. We're still ahead of 2006, at that level, and still off the most recent market peak of $437 million in 2008.

It'll be possible to do some more fine-tuning on that when the end-of-year market shares and some more data come in — and individual month estimates will need some tweaking. But that's the estimate from here at the moment. Subject to change, as always!

Backtracking to December, again — Justice League #4 led the market, and it's a lock that Diamond will find Justice League #1 as the top-seller of the year. Walking Dead Vol. 15: We Find Ourselves led the trades for the month. The market shares are here:

TOP COMIC BOOK PUBLISHERS

PUBLISHER	DOLLAR SHARE	UNIT SHARE
MARVEL COMICS	34.43%	39.05%
DC COMICS	33.74%	37.72%
IMAGE COMICS	6.75%	4.89%
IDW PUBLISHING	5.26%	4.43%
DARK HORSE COMICS	3.97%	3.34%
DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT	3.35%	3.27%
EAGLEMOSS PUBLICATIONS	1.63%	0.37%
BOOM! STUDIOS	1.41%	1.32%
VIZ LLC	1.19%	0.50%
ARCHIE COMICS	0.82%	0.98%
OTHER NON-TOP 10	7.44%	4.12%

There is probably more to be written on what's going on with trade paperbacks: as I've noted here before this year and yesterday on The Beat, the decline in trade orders would have been the big story of the year had it not been for the DC relaunch. Certainly the lack of hits on the scale of last year had something to do with it; another element is that trade sales echo periodical sales, so the weaker sales of comics in the first half of the year played out in the second half — when, of course, there was also the relaunch soaking up dollars. I also wonder whether Borders' closure played a role by dumping a lot of books at deep discount on the market, soaking up demand. In any event, the relaunch collections may help the business out in the first part of 2012.

Diamond will publish its end-of-year charts next week, I expect, as well as the full Top 300s for December. In the meantime, be sure to check out the tables from the last 20 years, now online here. And be sure to "like" Comichron on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!