November was the second month for which Diamond published percentage change information for its overall comics and trade paperback sales — and a number of kinks are still being worked out of the process. Many (but not all) are on my end, as you’ll read — and as such, it took about three weeks in … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors has released its initial sales report for November 2010, a month in which it appears that dollar sales on collected editions including TV-boosted Walking Dead jumped nearly 12%, while comics dollar sales dropped nearly 5%. Combined dollar sales were slightly up, by less than 1%. Last November was boosted in part by … Read more
Having had some time to digest the numbers from Diamond’s wave of October data — and prompted by the helpful findings of an analysis by ICV2 — I’ve taken another look to see what the additional data means when it comes to those comics ranking beneath 300th place. As ICV2 notes, the new Diamond data … Read more
A week ago, I posted an analysis of Diamond Comic Distributors‘ Top 300 Comics list for September — and my assertion that the number of lower-ranking comics constituted sales of increasing importance. I had also observed throughout the year that my “Overall Comics Sales” model, which integrates complete publisher sales data with Diamond’s market shares … Read more
My report earlier this week on the September 2010 sales of comics through Diamond detailed an increasing problem: that the Top 300 comics were providing less and less of the overall picture, and actually showing the industry as worse off than my calculations of its overall size were finding. With today’s release of the top … Read more
September 2009 was the best month of last year for comics sales, and this September had a difficult time keeping pace. Unit and dollar sales for comic books in the Top 300 were down 14% and 12% respectively, while top-selling trade paperbacks held firmer, off only 2%. Backlist sales and sales of comics below 300th … Read more