February 2014 wrap-up

Well, I've pretty much exhausted the number of things I want to talk about on the February 2014 numbers. Hope you've found it interesting. There won't be as much on future months, I just had a lot of frames I wanted to look at the numbers through the first time around. In the future I'll pick one or two hopefully interesting angles. And if next month has a more typical Graphic Novel chart, without a flood of liquidated backlist, that will allow me to do a few interesting looks at the numbers.

If you're more interested in long term trends on an individual series, I recommend the articles which will appear on The Beat, probably within the next few weeks.

It'll be mostly links on this blog for the next few weeks, maybe a few surprises. I'm thinking of taking a look at some of the notable March releases ahead of the numbers release and see how closely I can guess their sales based on past trends.

If you have any ideas for interesting ways of looking at the numbers, or questions about anything specific, feel free to leave a comment here, or email me. I'm especially interested if anyone has thoughts on how to define backlist perennials on Diamond's Graphic Novel chart, which I intend to keep track of over here. My current working definition is any book published over six months ago which has made the Top 300 at least half the time in the last two years or since it was published, so an older book like a SANDMAN volume would have to chart at least 12 out of the last 24 months (which three of them manage), while a recent book like an ADVENTURE TIME collection published 8 months ago would have to chart at least 4 of those months. There are 115 books in the last two years which meet that definition, 64 of which appear on the February chart (a bit lower than normal, because of the extra Marvel entries).

I'm also going to work on a glossary of terms. Are there any any I've used that might seem obvious to me, but esoteric to someone who hasn't been following this stuff? I know I'm always struggling over when to use the term "graphic novel", which isn't one I like, but pretty much have to use to be consistent with the places I'm linking to and getting the data from.