The books were originally published in 37 single issues (making the project, mathematically, over three times better than the 12-issue WATCHMEN) starting June 2012 and, after various delays and changes in plans, finishing in April 2013. Going by John Jackson Miller's estimates for the sales on the year-end Diamond lists for those two years, direct market sales started at over 100,000 for the initial releases (115,500 for the first one, fell sharply after that and then continued to drift down until the final issues sold just over 40,000. So you can place the maximum number of copies of the full story in single issue form around at level, though I know a lot of those final issues are still sitting unsold in comic shops. The average issue sold about 62,000 copies. There were also "digital combo packs" for each issue, but none of them sold enough to make Diamond's top 300, so those wouldn't add much to those numbers (more on digital combo packs in an upcoming post).
We don't have nearly as comprehensive numbers for WATCHMEN CLASSIC, but Miller has dug up numbers for Capital City, one of the major distributors of the time, and they show that single distributor sold an average of over 32,000 copies of each issue just in pre-orders. And instead of losing over 60% of sales from the first issue to the last, it actually gained readers. Since Capital was almost certainly much less than half the direct market at the time, I think we can confidently say WATCHMEN sold much more than 62,000 an issue.
The new comics were collected in four hardcover volumes in June and July 2013. They shipped an average of just over 4000 copies each in the initial month of release, and by the end of the year were at an average of just over 5000 copies each.
| Title | First Month Estimate | Year End Estimate | Reorders per month Estimate |
| BW Comedian Rorschach HC | 4,443 | 5,700 | 251 |
| BW Minutemen Silk Spectre HC | 3,939 | 5,100 | 194 |
| BW Nite Owl Dr Manhattan HC | 4,076 | 4,800 | 145 |
| BW Ozymandias Crimson Corsair HC | 3,705 | 4,600 | 149
|
| Average BW book | 4,041 | 5,050 | 185 |
So Diamond's "over 3,500 accounts" were scrambling to meet demand for the books to the tune of under 200 copies per book per month, on average.
Of course, there's always the mass market. According to the Bookscan numbers Brian Hibbs supplies, COMEDIAN sold 4,948 in their reporting markets, NITE OWL sold 3,407 and MINUTEMEN sold 3,180. OZYMANDIAS didn't make the top 750 that Hibbs posted, so all we can say is that it's less than 2,660 copies, so the books average under 3,600 copies. They also don't appear to have ever been on Amazon's Top 50 based on Dave Carter's charts, though a few of them did briefly show up on the New York Times hardcover graphic books chart.
Again, we don't know how the original did, but again from Miller's look at Capital's numbers "Initial orders for the first printing were 7,650 copies at Capital, with the second printing getting initial orders of 2,335 copies", so that's almost 10,000 copies sold in short order from just one of several direct market distributors, plus it was known to be one of the most impressive sellers in the mass market in that era.
We do have some idea of how the original continues to sell. It's available in four different print editions: the standard softcover, the "international edition" softcover, the deluxe hardcover and the Absolute edition. Over the past decade, those editions have sold well over 1.3 million copies combined in the direct market and BookScan reporting mass market. That's heavily weighted towards the years when the film adaptation was in the news of course, especially before people actually saw the movie, but even in 2013 it sold well over 40,000 copies in those markets, in its 27th straight year of availability.
There's also the black box of digital, where there are no real solid numbers for even a portion of the market, but we can see that while WATCHMEN proper is #13,129 today on Amazon's Kindle store, the BEFORE WATCHMEN books range from #139,947 to #440,624. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that the original book is selling multiple times what the new books are in that particular market, probably more than all four combined.
(note, someone sent me this link to a post by author Theresa Ragan estimating Kindle rankings sales levels based on her own experiences. They seem to indicate the BW books are selling less than a copy a day, while WATCHMEN is in the higher end of the "5 to 15 books a day" range).
We obviously don't know enough about the internal calculations at DC and the total numbers to declare the project a profit or loss, but it's hard not to see them as disappointing for something as well publicized as this. There are fewer than 60,000 print copies of the whole story sold to those markets we get decent numbers for, numbers that the original book can match in a good year. That can't be what they went in thinking they'd be happy with.
Now of course, we still have the paperback editions of BEFORE WATCHMEN coming out in a few months, and that's the format where the original book has seen most of its sales over the years, so there's a chance a larger audience is waiting for the books in their preferred format and price point. There might be a price drop on the digital versions when the paperbacks come out as well, which might get them selling up to a copy a day.We'll get an idea if that's the case over the next year.
There's also the black box of digital, where there are no real solid numbers for even a portion of the market, but we can see that while WATCHMEN proper is #13,129 today on Amazon's Kindle store, the BEFORE WATCHMEN books range from #139,947 to #440,624. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that the original book is selling multiple times what the new books are in that particular market, probably more than all four combined.
(note, someone sent me this link to a post by author Theresa Ragan estimating Kindle rankings sales levels based on her own experiences. They seem to indicate the BW books are selling less than a copy a day, while WATCHMEN is in the higher end of the "5 to 15 books a day" range).
We obviously don't know enough about the internal calculations at DC and the total numbers to declare the project a profit or loss, but it's hard not to see them as disappointing for something as well publicized as this. There are fewer than 60,000 print copies of the whole story sold to those markets we get decent numbers for, numbers that the original book can match in a good year. That can't be what they went in thinking they'd be happy with.
Now of course, we still have the paperback editions of BEFORE WATCHMEN coming out in a few months, and that's the format where the original book has seen most of its sales over the years, so there's a chance a larger audience is waiting for the books in their preferred format and price point. There might be a price drop on the digital versions when the paperbacks come out as well, which might get them selling up to a copy a day.We'll get an idea if that's the case over the next year.
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