For as long as I can remember, comic sales charts have fascinated me to the max. There was a time when the legendary The Comics Beat Blog by Heidi McDonald would list the monthly Marvel, DC, and indie numbers along with their historical trajectory (per series!), all expertly commented upon. And some of those commentators had themselves a historical trajectory, some them writing about comic sales since the mid 90s... (newsgroups-boomer will remember!)
Anyways, in my eyes, no comic in the world could be more exciting than devouring these sales charts & commentaries. And even though this week is particularly hectic, I use the 'relaxation time' after midnight to crunch some Walt's numbers, because we have a reached a level in sales when analyzing sales data starts to become interesting.
Two numbers to start with: In September we have sold 3614 units in total, spread across 2330 titles. It means that a number of titles between 1284 and 2330, so let's just take an average of 1807 or roughly half of the titles have only sold one meager copy! Since we have an average influx of 1200-1400 new titles every month, most of the single-diggits are long-tailed titles, which continue to sell at a slow pace. Our current inventory is at close to 19K, so it means that only something like 14% of our titles managed to sell at least one copy in that particular month. Keep in mind that we might have double diggits worth of units per title, so now you can understand that the monthly sales are only the tip of the iceberg, nonetheless the fundament has still to be housed and kept moderately warm and dry and complete and in top shape, in case someone decides to pull the trigger next month (or next year! or in five!).
This is the breakdown of our formats by revenue. Since Omnis and oversized books are much more expensive than, let's say Singles or Manga, they will naturally dominate the revenue chart.
It's a pretty standard month, except for the oversized HCs being much higher (due to the new Image Big Book Deals) and the Artist Editions a bit lower than usual. Though we used to be closer to 80% Omnis only two years ago, we are still very much a HARDCOVER focused business: A whopping 75+% of our revenue is generated by hardbacked books. Now on to the publishers...
I don't think anyone is surprised to see Marvel at the top. But it needs to be said that whenever I checked our publisher ranking in the past half a year, Marvel was loosing ground. We have started with Marvel being almost our complete business, especially in the time when DC stopped producing big books for a while. And now Marvel has slipped under 40%. Though this is the first time they have gained a little since the last time I checked, so we might see the bottoming-out of their "downfall".
Also, it's not so much that we sell LESS Marvel, but that our gains in the past few months have mainly come from the two follow-up publishers: DC + Image. Both have considerably improved their game when it comes to hardcovers collections, and since this is what our customers mostly want to buy, it's not a surprise they are gaining in revenue share.
Dark Horse is holding up very strong, and their success is based on three properties: Black Hammer (the beautiful Libraries), the Hellboy/Mignolaverse and most importantly the Berserk HC Edition. Dark Horse has long understood how to cater to the audience of beautiful hardcover books: excellent quality without charging exorbitant prices. The Berserk hardcovers have revolutionized the entire manga segment. Nobody thought it would possible to sell 50$-Manga-volumes, and now hardly a week goes by without the announcement of a new HC Collector's Edition of a well-known manga classic...
If manga sales seem a bit sluggish, it's primarily because, honestly, we still struggle to fully reach our potential in this segment. Additionally, in a revenue-defined ranking, the price per unit is a crucial factor, and it's relatively low for Viz and manga in general. We sell almost as many manga volumes from Viz as we do graphic novels/big books from Image. However, the average price per unit is around €14 vs. €47 and without the increased sales of manga box sets that first number would be much lower...
Lastly, I am really happy to see Fantagraphics doing so well. It's the highest I've ever seen them ranking, and I hope that they keep rising... The mix of high quality production, excellent curation of old and archival material as well as off-beat manga plus a very eclectic literary program: Fanta has it all. More power to them!
IDW for us means two things: Turtles and Artist Editions. If either has a new volume out, the sales surge, without them there is still the long tail of perennial bestsellers like Last Ronin and From Hell but, really, IDW doesn't have too many of them.
Yen Press used to be around 0.5%, so they did gain popularity lately and that's great, because it is the one publisher we never have problems with right issues — Seven Seas on the other hand is loosing ground because we can either not get stock or popular licesenses translated into English do not have the rights to be sold in Europe: Booooh!
The last One-percenter is Boom. Their books have an equally good value-for-money as the Dark Horse books and they are also very well produced. The problem is: Not enough titles. Whatever the hold-up is for SIKTC Volume 2 hardcover, it's not benefiting their "market share" in the world of collected editions.
After Boom come a number of smaller publishers which, on the first glance, might look neglectable business-wise, but we not only want to expand our business with, but also hope that they catch up with the hardcover trend in collected editions because we really like their comics!
One thing we're very curious about, is to see how Titan's Conan books will do. Initially they had rather weak pre-orders, but they have catched up in the past months and the new series by Jim Zub is quite popular.
We had an interesting talk with the 2000AD/Rebellion-crowd during New York Comic Con. Both Omar and myself tried to persuade them into releasing their Judge Dredd Collections in an oversized and hardbacked format. I am sure that will do wonders for their sales. In the meantime, and in case you didn't heard yet, we have a special collab with them: Walt's will be the one EU destination if you're interested in their high end and super-limited webshop-exclusives! We already offer two books for pre-order: the Steve Dillon - Apex Slipcase Edition and Nemesis The Warlock HC Vol 1!
Clover Press is another tiny publisher, who has started to gain traction. First with their absolutely stunning Terry & the Pirates Collection, and they have now announced many interesting art books and collected editions and everything in premium hardcover format. Also on the watchlist are Oni Press, who after many years of dormancy have really ramped up production and have the mega-property du jour in their portfolio: If the Scott Pilgrim animated show will hit as hard as everyone predicts, 2024 will be a great year for Oni. And it will hopefully give them enough cash flow to expand and reprint (Sixth Gun! Kaijumax!) more of their hardcover collections.
In the second part (coming this weekend), I'll take a look at specific titles and we'll have a look at our bestsellers.
If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments.
