When Marvel took its direct market comics distribution to its own distributor, Heroes World, in 1995, it was no longer possible to look at a single distributor’s rankings to see a real top-seller list. From then until August 1996, the only public sales charts that reconciled all publishers’ titles were based on retailer reports, such … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors recently released its charts of comics and trade paperbacks ordered by retailers in April 2009, and as reported earlier, the market appears to have made up some of the ground lost in the first three months of 2009. Sales increases versus the previous year were observed in all categories, including, just barely, … Read more
The April 2009 analysis is almost finished (though the tables are online already), but in looking back through the historical numbers, I found something that sheds some light on a frequently asked question: What portion of new comics sales is outside the Top 300? The only way to know is to have a look at … Read more
The full report will follow later — an exceptionally busy month here — but the April 2009 sales charts are online here. As expected, they report a significant rebound, helping the market to recover some of the ground lost in the first part of the year. There are also some other factors of interest, about … Read more
The April comic book sales data is being processed right now, and it does appear to be a strong month — certainly the healthiest of the year so far. I want to take a second look at the data before release, however; whenever there’s movement in the estimates, it’s usually a good idea. Stay tuned… … Read more
I had mentioned before that, while looking at things like how many copies the #1 title each month had sold over time (and that data appears here) was interesting, we could learn some more by looking at the changes across the entire distributor Top 300 Comics lists. To show what I mean, here’s a quick … Read more