by Brian Hibbs
There was
a 19th-century American poet by the name of John
Godfrey Saxe who wrote a poem
(based upon an Indian fable) about six blind men (and an elephant),
each who describe something very different based upon what
part of the elephant they have touched. You may know the story,
but you’ve probably never read/forgotten the poem. Go give
it a read, and tell me that it doesn’t equally describe God…
and the Comics Industry.
Welcome
to the third annual review of the bookstore market.
Also known
as “Blind Mr. Hibbs tries to tell you about an elephant”
The one
thing I know, after three years of this exercise, is that
I really know very little at all. I can present you some pieces
of information, but they’re not exhaustive. I think I can
make some interesting conclusions from, and analysis of, the
narrow stream of data we have, but don’t mistake this for
being, in any way, definitive information.
For your
background, let’s go over some of the basics:
“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, 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, not 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”. Provided
here is the BookScan report from the last week of 2005.
(Note - it's a pretty big Excel file, which can be saved
or opened on your local machine, if you have Excel.)
(For points
of comparison, the 2004 BookScan report
can be found here, with my analysis from 2004
here. You can also find the 2003 BookScan report
here, with my analysis from 2003 here.)
It is important
to remember a few things here. First and foremost, this isn’t
directly a list of the “year’s best-sellers” – this is a report
of what sold best in the last reporting week of 2005. In order
to make this list, a book had to sell 154 copies in
the last week of 2005. If a book sold 153 copies this week,
and otherwise sold 10,000 copies throughout the year, it
will not appear on this report.
This is
also 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, Baker & Taylor, or
the rest of the indie bookstores), and mass market retailers
like Wal-Mart, this is probably missing a big chunk of library
sales, university sales, airport sales, etc. This
Publisher’s Weekly article [from 2003] (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 possible that the number or volume of stores
has changed dramatically over the last 2 years. 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.
Further,
there are indications that books occasionally get miscategorized
– this ICv2 report says that
the number one comic title for the first week of 2005 was
mistakenly listed in the “Children’s Book” section, rather
than with the graphic novels. I can’t tell you what things
that are comics got miscoded so as to not be on this list
– though I can tell you that, this year, 15 of the 751 listed
items are, ooops, Calendars, not comics. Including, head-shakingly,
the #1 volume item on the list. This kind of coding error
really makes it that much harder to give you good data, so
someone with the ability, go shake Nielsen and get them to
fix that problem for next year…
The scope
of under- or mis-reporting is unknown to me, but it probably
would dramatically change some specific rankings. So, be certain
to understand what this 2005 BookScan report actually is – last-week-of-the-year
sales only to that subset of non-DM stores that report to
BookScan, except in the cases where BookScan made an error.
Got all that?
I definitely
think you should not only look at the chart, as presented,
but also save it to your own computer and sort it out in various
ways: especially the year-to-date (YTD) column, and the “publisher”
column (which is often the distributor, not the publisher).
We’ll talk
some more about the DM and how it compares a bit further down
in the column.
As always,
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.
*
* *
So, preamble
out of the way, let’s look at the most basic of information
about the bookstore market. For the purposes of this analysis,
I’ve chosen to scrub out the 15 mis-coded calendars that appear
on the 2005 list – this yields 736 items rather than the 751
reported in 2003 & 2004. On the other hand, I’ve opted
to keep the items that appear to be miscoded that are “art
books” or “prose” because a) at least they are books
b) most have at least a tangential relationship to comics
and c) it is what I did last year. There are six of these
not-comics books, and one of them, Bloody Crown of Conan
was also on the 2004 report. The other four are: Art of
George RR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice (Humorously credited
to Brian Wood as the author?!?), Vampire Hunter D (prose)
volumes 1 & 2 (may be Japanese, but it isn’t comics),
Brom’s Plucker, (an illustrated novella), and a “Forgotten
Realms” novel The Dark Elf Trilogy v1 PB. If you do
your own analysis, feel free to find and replace on those
to delete them if you so choose.
Again, it
is very important to remember that this is not an “end
of the year” report per se – it is entirely possible that
there are books that sold, say, 10k copies over the course
of the year, but didn’t sell enough copies the last week of
the year to chart. There’s really no way to determine how
much of the book market isn’t being reported in this format,
but it’s probably safe to say that it is significant (I’d
take a wild, stabbing guess at between 20 and 50%)
In 2003,
the last-week-of-the-year report had 5,495,584 books being
sold for a total gross dollar sales of $66,729,053.
In 2004,
the BookScan report had 6,071,123 pieces sold for total gross
dollar sales of $67,783,487. (+10.5% in pieces, but only +1.6%
in dollars.)
In 2005,
the BookScan report totals out to 7,007,345 pieces sold for
a total gross dollar volume of $75,459,669. That is astounding
growth, no matter how you cut it, amounting to +15% in pieces
and +11% in dollars. That’s even more astounding when you
remember the list is 15 items shorter this year because of
the calendar thing!
Nearly a
million books more sold. And pretty much all of them manga,
for that matter.
Another
interesting place to look at the relative health of comics
in book stores is the cut off threshold for appearing on the
chart. The chart is ranked by that week’s sales. That’s
really key because the year’s data is limited to the 751 items
actually listed on the charts. In 2004, a book had to sell
98 copies during the last week of the month in order to place
on the chart. A book that sold 97 copies that week, but had
sold 25k the rest of the year would not appear on the chart.
In 2005
a book had to sell 154 copies, in the last week, to make it
on to the chart. Looking at it that way, that’s a 58% growth
in the cut-off “threshold” from 2004. Once again I think it
shows comics material in general is selling stronger. In fact,
the “threshold” was 68 copies in 2003, which makes the 2-year
growth in the cut-off to be about 125%. That’s pretty massive.
The item
selling the most pieces on the 2005 BookScan list was Fullmetal
Alchemist v1 with 67,781 copies sold. The number one item
in terms of dollars sold was Frank Miller’s Sin City v1 with $857,659.
I’ve also
arbitrarily divvied the 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), and 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, 2003 had 125 of the 751 spots, and
sold 1,246,141 units for a total retail of $16,095,800. The
average humor title on the list sold 9,969 units.
In 2004,
the category took 108 spots, for 829,279 units and $11,460,533.
The average humor title on the list sold 7,678 units.
In 2005,
there are only 35 “Humor” books on the chart, totaling 428,941
pieces, and $5,904,947 in dollars. This means the average
humor book sold 12,255 copies.
“Humor”
has always been the traditional bookstore winner for comics,
and the incursion of Manga has really caused this category
to lose placements – under a third of last year, about a quarter
of 2003. On the other hand, because what’s left is really
the best of the best sellers, the average sale of a
charting Humor book shot massive upwards.
Now that
we have three different years to compare, you can really see
the strength of the “evergreen” Humor book. 29 of the 35 titles
on the 2005 list were also on the 2003 and 2004 lists! There
are basically nine properties in this “evergreen” category
– Bongo’s Simpsons comics (9 titles), Calvin &
Hobbes (8 titles), Foxtrot (3), Boondocks,
Far Side, and Garfield (2 each), “Book of Bunny Suicides”,
Spy vs Spy and Zits (each with one)
The Bongo
Simpsons comics are, arguably, the biggest unsung success
of the Humor section of the charts – in 2005 twelve different
titles charted, with nine of them being “evergreen” (appearing
every chart since ’03). Nearly $1.7 million dollars sold in
2005, and when was the last time you read about Bongo comics
in the press or on the internet?
Bill Watterson’s
Calvin & Hobbes continues to amaze me – 2005 makes
10 years since the strip has had a new installment, and, still,
the majority of his collections make the charts, both this
year, and three years running. What’s even more impressive
is that the big honking $150 boxed collection of the strip
seems to have really spurred the sales of the paperbacks –
five of the eight listed volumes posted a solid sales increase
from 2004, and even the lowest listed book did 92% of its
2004 sales.
The Book of Bunny Suicides is the best-charting Humor book in
2005, with 38,141 copies sold (it was also the 2004 best seller)
For Manga, 2003 had 447 spots, for 3,361,966
units and $34,368,409. The average manga title on the list
sold 7,521 units.
In 2004,
the category took 518 spots, for 4,603,558 units and $45,069,684.
The average manga title on the list sold 8,887 units.
In 2005,
the category took 594 spots, for a grand total of 5,691,425
pieces and $53,922, 514. The average manga title sold 9582
units.
There’s
nothing to call this except crazy growth. +23.6% in pieces,
+19.6% in dollars. Even the average sale is up by 7.8%.
Manga absolutely
dominates these charts – with 594 of 736 spots that means
that 80% of the books placing on BookScan are Manga!
More so than last year, I think it is really apparent that
there needs to be two charts – one for Eastern comics and
one for Western. It’s increasingly hard to compare the markets
when we’re effectively only shown one of them.
Again remembering
all of the caveats in the first section about what the BookScan
is and is not, Manga sold about 1.09 million more books in
2005 than it did in 2004. That’s slower overall growth than
2003 to 2004 where it was 1.3 million more books.
One thing
that immediately strikes me when you sort the manga alphabetically
is that it’s not just individual books, it is whole series
that are charting. Each and every one of the 22 Rurouni
Kenshin books makes the chart, for the most extreme example.
While there are 594 books on the charts, it appears to only
be 165 different properties.
What’s also
fairly amazing is that the year-to-year decline of many titles
is actually pretty low, showing that a fairly astounding number
of these items are really “evergreen”. To pull a single example,
Chobits v1 sold 38,951 in 2003, 24,956 in 2004, and
19,466 in 2005. Now, yes, that’s about a 20% decline from
’04 to ’05, but we’re talking about a completed series here,
with no (that I know of) new advertising or promotion, and
the first volume is still shifting nearly 20k copies. I, frankly,
boggle at this. It is (just) conceivably possible that these
numbers are reflective of new stores bringing in manga for
the first time, but that appears to be increasingly unlikely
to this observer.
There are
80 manga titles that have appeared on all three of the BookScan
reports I have access to – an astonishing showing when only
750 titles are listed each year. These “evergreen” titles
include 13 of the 14 volumes of Love Hina (oddly, volume
2 has never charted, leading me to guess that it has
been mis-categorized and appears on some other chart), 10
volumes of Inu Yasha, all 8 volumes of Chobits,
the first 5 Ranma ½ books, 4 Fushigi Yugi, and
3 each of Graviton, Samurai Deeper and Yu
Gi Oh.
When you
break it down by publisher, Viz takes 319 of the 594 slots
in the 2005 charts, with Tokyopop taking 173. That’s quite
the reversal from last year, when Tpop had 265 against Viz’s
174. I find this especially interesting because Tokyopop is
largely synonymous with “manga in bookstores” – I’d argue
that Tokyopop’s leadership in the $9.99 “authentic” format
is what led to the rise of manga in the first place.
Viz also
takes 8 of the top ten manga sellers (mostly from Naruto),
and 12 of the top 20. In fact, if it wasn’t for Fruits
Baskets, Tokyopop wouldn’t place a book until #23.
492 of the
594 (83%) spots on the manga titles on the 2005 BookScan charts
are taken up by the “Big Two” (heh), leaving 8 publishers
to fight for the rest. Random House has 35 placers, Dark Horse
21, ADV 15, DMP 14, Brocolli with 8, Ice Kunion has 4, DC/CMX
has 3, and Go! With 2.
Again, none
of this shows much, except what was happening the last week
of the year. It’s entirely possible that any publisher’s overall
strength in the book market in 2005 is wholly different than
this one-week snapshot. Don’t read too much into my conclusions.
The best
selling manga title on the chart is Fullmetal Alchemist
v1 at 67,781 copies. Fullmetal Alchemist is also the
#1 comic book in all categories for the year. In fact, 4 of
the top 5 are manga. 8 of the top 10, 16 of the top 20. Either
way, that’s a big absolute gain on 2004’s #1 manga book –
Rurouni Kenshin at 52,426. In fact, the first four
books in the 2005 top 5 sold more copies than that.
There are
four manga titles listed as having sales of over 50k. Fifty-six
have sales of 20k or higher. 184 have YTD sales of under 5000
copies.
One last
little manga note, this one on “OEL” (“Original English Language”)
– I count a total of 13 what I’d define as OEL titles on the
BookScan list: 3 volumes of Fred Gallagher’s MegaTokyo
from Dark Horse (V1 8612, V2 7580, V3 19554), and ten from
Tokyopop. These include Bizenghast (5987), DramaCon
(5707), Dreaming (1024), I Luv Halloween (4697),
Mark of the Succubus (2509), Midnight Opera
(1088), Offbeat (1668), Princess AI (V1 9862,
V2 12988) and Warcraft (20342).
Now, on
the one hand, it’s pretty astonishing that “no name” creators/works
are getting place on the BookScan lists at all – this shows
that Tokyopop has some real clout in the bookstores (very
very little original “western” works ever makes these lists)
But on the
other, most of those aren’t very impressive numbers, and,
for most of them, seem that they’re under any kind of short
term profitability using some simple back-of-an-envelope calculations.
Let’s say these volumes have 186 pages of content each – I
haven’t counted them, but they’re listed at 192 pages each,
and let’s call it 6 pages of house ads? Now, I have no idea
what kind of page rates they might be paying in advance of
royalties, but, for Western publishers at least, I’m not aware
of any that aren’t going to pay you at least $75 per-page
for writing and finished art (and that’s really really low
in American standards) – that’s nearly $14k in creative costs,
alone. Let’s assume also that Tokyopop has some really fantastic
printing and distribution deals, and is able to gross profit,
oh, 20% of cover price (which would be pretty damn enviable
for most American publishers), or $2 a book. So, that’s 7000
copies that need to be sold to cover sunk creative costs.
Now, look,
I have no idea what the OEL creator’s deals are – maybe they’re
all working purely for backend; nor do I know what Tokyopop’s
economic structures are, maybe they’re somehow working a better
percentage of cover than that – but I think I’m pretty safe
in saying that one of the reasons that manga publisher’s are
able to come out with the thousands of pages of books released
each month is because they don’t have to pay for the first-creation
of a work, and it strikes me that it’s really likely that
no one is making any money on original 192-page books
unless you’re moving 10k copies or more in a reasonable time
frame. Which most of these don’t appear to be doing, unless
it is tied to another brand (Warcraft or Courtney Love)
For DC, 2003 had 74 spots, for 336,569 units
and $6,151,258. The average DC book on the list sold 4,548
units.
In 2004,
the company took 39 spots, for 179,440 units and $3,135,983.
The average DC book on the list sold 4,601 units.
In 2005,
DC takes 42 spots (this is without the 3 spots in the manga
category from CMX), for 298,484 units and $5,440,001. Thus
the average DC title sold 7,107 copies.
Now that’s
a much better performance than last year for DC, solid
growth in almost every way of measuring these things. It appears
that the shakeups in DC’s marketing department have had some
positive impact upon sales in the bookstore market.
The one
thing that seems pretty instantly apparent looking at the
DC numbers is that Batman Begins certainly seems to
have had a positive impact on Batman sales – for one example,
the 18,640 copies of Batman Hush v1 sold in 2005 is
greater than the 10,244 sold in 2003 and 8,101 sold in 2004
combined. The same is true of the other Batman books
we can track in 2005 that charted in ’03 and ’04 – Hush
v2, Long Halloween, Dark Knight, Year
One, all sold more copies in ’05 than in ’03 and ’04 combined.
That last is pretty impressive because it is the new HC edition
of Batman: Year One comparing against softcovers in
the previous years – and they still shifted more than 15k
units!
DC’s “evergreen”
backlist (the books I can track each year from ’03 to ’05)
is only 12 items, but all but two rose in sales comparing
’04 to ’05 – Crisis on Infinite Earths is nearly doubled,
Kingdom Come is up by 4%, League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen v2, Watchmen and Sandman: Endless
Nights are all up by around 50%, Sandman: Preludes
& Nocturnes by more than 20%. That’s all good growth
on what were solid sales to begin with.
The build-up
to Infinite Crisis does an OK job of charting – Omac
Project (2505 YTD copies), Day of Vengeance (1206),
and Villains United (866) all make the charts, with
just a single month of release for them. Looking at their
initial velocities, I’m going to guess that none of them are
going to be great shakes in the book market, but it was a
little surprising to find them on this year’s list at all.
The big
one, of course, is Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis,
which pulls in 11,043 copies. Remember that DC did a “book
market edition” of this title, with Meltzer’s name ginormous
above the title. The Direct Market still handily beat that
(see more below) with at least 16,586 copies sold, but it
is still hard to scoff at 11k copies of a book – especially
one so firmly anchored in western comics continuity.
A few other
random notes: 2 volumes of DC’s Showcase series track,
with both Superman and Green Lantern selling
2700-ish copies. Green Lantern is hilariously attributed
to Dan Didio as the author! All four volumes of Teen Titans
make the list as well. Both occurrences surprise me a little.
Other than
Sandman (6 of the 12 books) and V For Vendetta
(which kind of doesn’t count), there are no other Vertigo
titles on the list – no Preacher, or Y The Last
Man or Fables. Those absences surprise me a lot.
V For Vendetta completely exploded though, with 15,358
copies sold, while it never made the charts any previous year.
Expect this to rise dramatically in ’06 as the film comes
closer.
Hm, wait,
I lie, Vertigo also places Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter
on the charts with YTD sales of 3024 copies. Which strikes
me as kind of tragically bad. Here’s a major new work by a
well known to the “real” world creator, that had a fair amount
of promotion around it, and that’s all it manages to shift?
The Direct Market bought 3982 copies, non-returnable, just
on its initial
order!
Also perhaps
of some note is that three of DC’s Absolute editions
manage to chart – Crisis on Infinite Earths (428 copies),
the Ross/Dini World’s Greatest Super Heroes (4770)
and Watchmen (3299). At $75 a throw, Absolute Watchmen
was DC’s ninth largest dollar book, with nearly a quarter
million dollar in sales at full retail. “Regular” Watchmen,
by the way, came in as the #1 dollar book for DC, at almost
$350k. The Ross/Dini book is #11 in dollars.
The best
selling DC book of the year is Batman: Hush v2 with
19,883 copies sold. Yes, it outsold v1 by some 1200 copies,
go figure! 17 of DC’s 42 places are under 5k copies.
For Marvel, 2003 had 73 spots, for 455,553 units
and $8,428,962. The average Marvel title on the list sold
6,240 units.
In 2004,
the company took 50 spots, for 227,985 units and $3,756,764.
The average Marvel title on the list sold 4,560 units.
In 2005,
Marvel places 26 books, for 153,317 units and $2,459,027.
The average Marvel title on the list sold 5,897 units.
Once again,
Marvel gets lost in the sea of manga.
The average
sale is climbing, so that’s good news, at least. But it’s
almost pointless to discuss Marvel in a separate section at
this point, because we’re only looking at 26 titles now.
There are
7 “evergreen” Marvel trades we can track from ’03 to ’05:
Ultimate Spider-Man v1, 2 & 6, Ultimate X-Men
v1 & 2, Ultimates v1, and Origin. All of
them declined except for Ultimate X-Men v1, and all are far
below their ’03 numbers. Origin went from 25,601 in
’03, to 8302 in ’04, to 7546 in ’05, for example.
Not a single
Marvel digest format book appears on the list.
Ooh, I just
realized, for the first time since I’ve been doing these reports
it is no longer true that books about comics sell better than
the comics themselves – the DK Publishing Marvel (and DC)
guides have dropped down below the sales of the characters
they cover. Would that it were the other way (Marvel sales
climbing up to meet the old DK numbers), but at the least
we can retire at least one old saw.
Marvel’s
best selling book is the Joss Whedon-penned Astonishing
X-Men with 13,948 sold – hey, better than Identity
Crisis! That’s an OK number, but I’d really expect it
to be a bit higher, given Whedon’s profile. At number 2 is
Neil Gaiman’s 1602 – which sold 11,767
copies, a sold rise from ‘04’s 10,183. Even more shocking
is that it is selling better than any Sandman volume
on the chart, which blows my little mind.
10 of Marvel’s
26 books on the list sold under 5k.
For Everything Else, 2003 had 32 spots, for 95,355 and
$1,684,624. The average works out to 2,980 units.
In 2004,
Everything Else was 36 spots, for 230,831 units and $4,360,522.
The average works out to 6,412 units.
In 2005,
Everything Else comes to 39 spots, for 435,178 units, and
$7,733,180. That average works out to 11,158.
Frank Miller
is the 800-pound gorilla here – the seven volumes of Sin
City collectively sold 185,713 copies for $3.2 million.
More than 40% of the total.
Dark Horse
continues that winning streak by having the Star Wars
license when the movie is in the theatre – the adaptation
of Episode III sold 48,384 copies, and they place 7
other Star Wars titles that sell another 40,594 combined.
The one Star Wars book listed on all charts from 2003
to 2005, Clone Wars v1, sells 9878 copies – up more
than half from last year (6438)
Hellboy
didn’t place on the chart this year, so it looks like the
movie-driven success of last year (16,355 copies) didn’t stick
at all. Also no placing for other Dark Horse 2004 titles Whedon’s
Fray, and Chabon’s Escapist.
Still, when
you add their manga business in as well (another 21 titles
there), and, hey, the new Conan trade is on there as well,
huh, Dark Horse is currently the largest American bookstore
publisher tracking the last week of 2005 in BookScan, at about
$7 million in full-retail bookstore sales. Not too shabby
there, considering they started with anthologies and funny
animals…
But, hey,
what the hell happened to last year’s big winners? Art Spiegelman’s
In the Shadow of No Towers, sold 43k last year, and
doesn’t chart at all this year. Same with Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis, which did 26k in 2004. No charting at all
in 2005, meaning, at least, that they fell below the threshold
of 154 copies sold during the week.
The Complete
Peanuts v1 was the #3 book in this group last year at
25,224, this year, the 1955-’58 box set is the only Peanuts
charter at 9,225 copies. Keep in mind that’s nearly a half-million
dollars in full-retail sales, however. Big win for Fantagraphics
there. FBI also squeaks in with Chris Ware’s newest volume
of Acme Novelty Library #16 with 1196 copies sold in
the first week (or two) of release. On the other hand Ghost
World and Locas disappear from the list.
There are
also a couple of “poached”-from-Fantagraphics books on the
chart – the Acme Novelty Library HC (the really tall
one; Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy in the World
doesn’t appear on this year’s list) with 6583 copies, and
Charles Burns’ Black Hole with 7460 copies. I’ll have
a few thoughts on the latter down a bunch in the Direct Market
portion of our chat.
Top Shelf
makes the list with 6654 copies of Craig Thompson’s Blankets.
That’s a pretty steady performance compared to 2004’s 6882
copies.
And Slave
Labor hits twice with Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal
Maniac (9879) and Squee (5835). This marks the
third straight year of rising sales on JTHM, and Squee
is relatively flat, compared to 2004’s 5924 copies.
Also of
note, 6576 copies of Joann Sfar’s wonderful The Rabbi’s
Cat, and 16,578 copies of the R. Crumb Handbook with
CD, which is really kind of astounding.
No trace
of Jeff Smith’s Bone from the scholastic versions,
which has me wondering what the story there is.
Finally,
Image places 3 books – Walking Dead volumes 1, 3, and
4 (4152, 3555, and 992, respectively)
Overall,
very little that’s not Manga, Humor, or from the “Big Two”
shows on the BookScan chart, again leading me to the conclusion
that, for the most part, the Direct Market is the name of
the game for the bulk of “art comics”… or even “non traditional”
sales. That’s not to say that a much much better job can’t
be done in the DM, because it can – but specialists appear
to do a better job selling specialist material than the generalist
book store market does.
12 of the
39 “other” spots sold under 5k copies.
*
* *
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, and, our subject
this time, 2005.
Still, there’s
a certain amount of figuring it out that can be done. It is
possible to sum up ICv2’s
reports and draw conclusions from there. This year we
“lucked out”, and had a title that was released in the last
month of the year (thus we have “100%” of its sales reported),
that placed near the very bottom of the year-end Diamond chart.
Rann/Thanagar War is the 97th best selling
book of the year, and sold 6808 copies in December, the month
it was released. Therefore, regardless of our ability to see
other sales, we’re assured that everything else on the chart
sold at least that many copies.
I call this
“the Watchmen effect”, as a large portion of the sales
of that perennial are actually invisible to the reporting
methods used in the DM. See, Watchmen was Diamond’s
15th best-selling book of the year, but it only
actually appears on 8 of the 12 months worth of “Top 100”
lists in 2005.We can track that Watchmen sold 11,358
copies in those 8 months. However, the #16 year-end book,
Y, The Last Man v5 tracked on 4 of the 6 months it
was released, selling 13,058 copies. Thus, it is absolutely
certain that Watchmen sold at least 13,059 copies
– or that there are at least 1,701 copies that never
tracked (or: 15%). In fact, it’s conceivable that, if Watchman
was the #101 book in February, April, May and October (the
4 months it didn’t chart), that there could be another 4392
copies that never tracked. Watchmen clearly sold, in
the Direct Market, at least somewhere between 13k and 15k
copies, despite only being able to see 11k of them.
Got all that?
Or perhaps
we can put it more starkly: the #43 year-end book, Walking
Dead v4 can track 9679 copies. The #42 book, Battle
of the Planets, doesn’t show up at all on any chart whatsoever!
Clearly, there are deep and wide gaps in the data we’re allowed
to see.
I also think
that there’s something broken either in the reporting of the
data, or in the way ICv2 massages it, and I can show it the
easiest in the top of the charts. The #2 book, Identity
Crisis, tracks sales in Sep (11923), Oct (3422), and Nov
(1241). It doesn’t chart in December. The sum of those sales
are 16,586. The #100 book in December shows 1137 copies. Therefore,
by ICv2’s data, the most number of copies Identity Crisis
could have sold would be 17,723 copies, right?
However,
the #3 book, Sin City v2, tracks in Mar (9203), Apr
(4227), May (1286), Jun (1862), Aug (1368), and Sep (1313)
– That’s 19,259 copies. Even if we assume that Sin City
v2 sold zero copies (ha!) in the 4 months it didn’t list,
that’s a 1536 copy discrepancy between what I can “prove”
for book #2 and book #3 – a fairly massive gulf.
So, somewhere,
somehow, there’s some broken in either how Diamond is reporting
data, or how ICv2 is interpreting it. One potential possibility
is that the monthly Top 100 charts only track the Direct Market
version of Identity Crisis (though it has the little
asterisk to indicate multiple covers combined), while the
year end chart is counting both versions (although it clearly
states it is the DM version charting there)
Diamond’s
#1 TP for the year is, not much of a surprise, Sin City
v1. Released in February (well, this edition, at least),
it appears on Top 100 charts from Feb to Sep only, with a
sum of 29,264 copies sold. Under “The Watchmen effect”, it
is likely that Sin City v1 actually sold closer to 31k copies.
11 of the
year-end Top 100 books are manga. 47 are from DC, 19 are from
Marvel. That means very little, because it is only 100 titles,
but there’s your snapshot. Perhaps more intriguing is that
only 51 of the top 100 are “superhero” comics.
Diamond’s
VP of Operations, Cindy Fournier, is kind enough to give me
a few more data points each year, so we can track a few metrics
of how the DM is performing. But we have a new caveat this
year.
While I
(and probably you, too), tend to separate things into two
channels (Direct Market and Bookstores), Diamond actually
has more than a dozen different ways of identifying customers.
This year they revised some of their internal guidelines of
what sales are from what categories, and because of this,
Cindy says, “These figures are probably not 100% accurate
in relationship to last year’s tallies; they’re probably 90%
accurate”. So, fair enough that.
Also, as
always, these figures are for Diamond Comic Distributors,
not Diamond Book Distributors, their bookstore arm.
The first
thing I always want to know is “how many DM stores are there?”
While this is a fluid calculation (for one of many examples,
if a chain store consolidates multi-store ordering into a
single order form, that is opaque to this snapshot), we’ve
set on using the number of accounts turning in a monthly order
form for the month of September as our benchmark each year.
In 2003 it was 3300 order forms. In 2004, it was 3275 order
forms. In 2005 it dropped to 3200. While this doesn’t necessarily
mean we’ve lost 75 stores over the last year, it does not
appear that the number of store-front retailers is increasing.
I hate to
be a broken record here, but I think that this is something
of major concern for all of us for the future of the business
– we absolutely have to get more stores opening up.
I also ask
Cindy to pull the number of stores ordering backlist items
from Diamond’s “STAR” system for September of each year. My
theory with this data point is that stores doing a healthy
business in book format comics has to be doing regular restocks
via STAR, rather than waiting for the “slow boat” of reorders
shipping through the regular frontlist monthly orders. This
“STAR penetration” figure was 1800 accounts in 2003, 2275
accounts in 2004, and 2400 accounts in 2005.
This, to
me, is a healthy statistic – that number is growing strongly
year to year, indicating more of the business is working with
and in perennial sales. A solid backlist department, properly
managed, is the bedrock of steady sales.
I also think
the “STAR penetration” figure is probably a closer indicator
of how many “real” comic book stores there are – knocking
out the buying collectives, or the card store carrying a few
“hot” comics, or whatever. My rule of thumb for “is it a comic
shop?” is probably “Do they stock and restock Watchmen?”
Since Diamond’s
publicly-presented charts don’t include this kind of information,
I also ask what overall growth looked like. For comic books,
Cindy tells me Diamond showed a +4.4% growth in dollars sold,
and +3.8% growth in pieces. Even better, TP/GN sales are up
a massive +16% in dollars, and +15% in pieces – that’s the
second year of double digit growth for the category, and beats
the relative growth of the BookScan charts for the book market
(+11% in dollars, +15% in pieces, to remind you)
Taken all
together, it appears as though, despite a shrinking number
of stores, they’re selling an increasing amount of material.
Given the substantial year-after-year growth in the book category,
this may be more impressive because direct competition is
rapidly increasing.
The main
thing I know is that pound-for-pound, an individual comic
book store will virtually always outsell a generalist bookstore
in Western material. This is as true for something as “mainstream”
as Identity Crisis (11,043 in bookstores, at least
16, 586 in the DM), as it is for something as “artsy” as Black
Hole. While Black Hole didn’t track on the top 100 Diamond
sales chart, so we can’t compare it to the 7460 in the BookScan
numbers, I did a quick straw poll of just 10 Direct Market
retailers – while there were a couple of “big boy” stores
in there, I also made a point of asking several suburban and/or
“superhero-oriented” stores as well. Between just those 10
stores, I was able to find 341 copies of Black Hole
purchased – or roughly 5% of the total copies sold through
every bookstore in the country combined. From ten stores!
More interestingly,
more than 40% of the copies from those 10 DM stores were purchased
from a DM source other than Diamond. And eight of the ten
said that they would have sold more copies than that, had
Diamond actually had them in stock past the initial solicitation.
(You can see last month’s Tilting
for more on that line of thinking)
So, yeah,
I’m bullish on the Direct Market and its continuing prospects,
and continue to be amazed that more resources aren’t being
put into growing and expanding the DM, as it can grow faster
and hotter for Western comics material than any other market.
That’s what
I see at least, with our flawed and clumsy data. And now you
have the data, too, to draw your own conclusions.
Just watch
out for elephant dung!
**************************
Brian
Hibbs has owned and operated Comix
Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You
can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally
serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on
Newsarama can be found right here.
