2014-07-14

New Chart Day Link Roundup

June Diamond charts are up. For some reason it looks like Diamond went back to just releasing the Top 300 for the comics (plus some scattered lower entries from the Small Press / Indy charts), which is a shame. That extra information was potentially interesting, if you got a good long run of it together.

Comichron has John Jackson Miller's chart over here, and some analysis here. Miller also has some other interesting posts recently, like an overview of 54 years of Archie sales figures, and it looks like he'll have some overall market data for 2013 up soon.

ICV2 has their Comics chart here, and Graphic Novels here. Analysis here.

A few quick observations.  The Books chart is just over half backlist (144 new, 156 backlist), thanks partly to a lot of discount items from DC this time around (for example, ABSOLUTE SUPERMAN FOR TOMORROW shipped over 1800 copies at fire sale prices averaging over 80% last month, and it's a book which only shipped about 1200 copies in the first month of release back in 2009). SAGA is still king of the backlist, with the three volumes being the top three backlist items and in the Top 10 of all book items. And of course AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE was the biggest new release by a wide margin, a first for Archie in that format.

Over on the Comics side, a bit of an aberration thanks to DC's themed variant covers. Until now, the availability of those variants was limited by retailer orders of the main cover (1 for 25). Starting in June, with the "Bombshell variants", DC allowed retailers to order as many as they wished. This led to an average increase on books with the variant of about 45% (not counting SUPERMAN, which also had a high profile new creative team, and JUSTICE LEAGUE UNITED which was on its second issue, and only fell 2% from sales of #1, which is effectively a 30%+ increase from expected sales). It remains to be seen if this particular variant theme was especially enticing or if the upcoming ones ("Batman 75" in July, "Selfies" in August, "Monsters" in October) deliver comparable results. I don't expect them to, but they should keep sales higher than the May base level.

Other than that, business as usual, lots of big second issue drops, averaging over 30%, a few surprisingly high launches, we'll see if any of them hold on to most of those numbers, and a few modest increases which might be sustainable content based rather than one-off gimmick based.

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