IDW has the above graphic on their website (adapted from the art of Gabriel Rodriguez for the LOCKE & KEY series he created with Joe Hill). Thought I'd save it here for posterity and highlight a few of the numbers for 2013.
Over 5 million comic books sold
Over 1 million graphic novels sold
Over 1 million ebooks sold
Over 1,000 thousand unique comics published
Over 400 graphic novels published
These are all kind of vague terms, of course. It's not clear if ebooks are considered a subset of the comic book or graphic novel sales, or entirely distinct from them, or partially overlapping with one category or the other. Even assuming distinct, that's a pretty good percentage of their sales in a market that didn't exist just a few years ago.
IDW had about 500 different comics available through Diamond in 2013 and 250 graphic novels, and I assume they don't publish a lot that isn't available through Diamond even if that's not the primary market for a particular book, so I'm not sure if the numbers they give include variant covers (and thus the "unique comics" wording) or new printings of older books, or they count digital releases as distinct from print releases.
Just going by Diamond's top 300, that accounts for about 4 million comics and 220 thousand graphic novels. The recent months where we see the top 400 for comics indicates that there's probably at least another 50 thousand a month in comics, so call that 4.6 million. Adding in a ballpark estimate of 10% for sales outside of North America gets you into that over 5 million category. Brian Hibbs' look at the BookScan numbers indicates another 180,000 graphic novels can be accounted for there, still leaving a majority that were sold in the non-BookScan reporting mass market and in the below the top 300 ranking direct market.
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