2014-04-08

Elsewhere: EARTH ONE total sales

Here's something interesting.  A service called Edelweiss puts up various publisher catalogs, including for the last several seasons DC Comics. Included are various bits of information to entice booksellers to stock the books. For the upcoming TEEN TITANS EARTH ONE VOL. 1 they include the following in "Key Selling Points":

SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE was a #1 New York Times Bestseller for 7 weeks; spent 37 total weeks on the list.
Total copies sold: 109,254 (50,549 direct market, 58,705 book trade)

Not often you see such precise numbers, instead of a more vague "over 100,000 copies". For comparison, the combined year-end estimates from Comichron for the four years the book was available (2010-2013) put direct market sales at 53,300 for the hardcover of EARTH ONE. It's possible that the last few thousand copies don't count since it looks like the remaining stock was sold off at higher discounts before the softcover came out and sold an additional 7700 copies. On the BookScan charts provided by Brian Hibbs the hardcover had combined sales of 51,530 copies over four years, with the softcover selling 8977 copies in 2013, so it looks like BookScan does capture a pretty large percentage of the book trade for this book, at least. If those numbers are just for the hardcover, as seems to be the case, then BookScan numbers account for over 87% of the book trade sales.

On the other hand, the listing for the hardcover edition of PUNK ROCK JESUS says that "The trade paperback edition of PUNK ROCK JESUS has sold over 20,000 copies", and the combined direct market charts and BookScan numbers for that only come up to 11,418 during 2013 (7,500 direct, 3918 BookScan), so that leaves a significant percentage of sales for that one outside those reporting markets, assuming it didn't have huge sales in the first few months of 2014.

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