{"id":4311,"date":"2017-01-13T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-31T18:39:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T23:39:00","slug":"december-2016-comics-sales-estimates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/13\/december-2016-comics-sales-estimates\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2016 comics sales estimates online; all new Comichron charts are now sortable, searchable!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/CCJLSS1\"This morning, Diamond Comic Distributors<\/b><\/a> released its detailed report on comics and graphic novels ordered by North American comics shops in December, and here at Comichron<\/b> we’ve completed our estimates based on it. Click to see our comics sales estimates for December 2016<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I wrote yesterday about December and how its lackluster performance nonetheless brought the Direct Market year to a positive conclusion overall<\/b><\/a>, up $1.7 million over last year \u2014 but allow a quick digression here on the presentation of the tables here at Comichron.<\/p>\n

We are, as you may have seen, in the middle of a redesign, our first since 2008 \u2014 and unlike that event, forced hurriedly by the failure of a previous content management system, the new look for the site is the result of a lot of thought into how I can get more data \u2014 and I have much that is unpublished \u2014 online more efficiently and in a more useful manner.<\/p>\n

To that end, I’ve made changes to my workflow, automating many file preparation steps that for 20 years on the spreadsheet side have been done by hand. On the web side, the styles for the tables \u2014 which once came in with lots of bric-a-brac courtesy of Microsoft Excel \u2014 have been standardized across the site. Only a handful of recent months have the new design, but each file is about half the size of its previous incarnation, loading faster. (You may need to hit refresh on some pages to see the new versions.)<\/p>\n

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A sample look at one of the new pages’ navigation; December 2016.<\/b><\/a> Click to go to it! <\/i><\/div>\n

More importantly, the new issue-level data tables are now all sortable<\/b> by column<\/b>. You can resort and reverse ranks by dollar rank, title, issue number, price, publisher, <\/b>and number of units sold<\/b>. Every column, essentially!<\/p>\n

And as a bonus, while it’s hard to make multiple column tables too mobile-friendly without a database involved, it is now possible to show only a small number of entries at a time <\/b>and page through them.<\/p>\n

The Top 300 pages currently default to loading the entire charts, although that may change; the end-of year charts like 2015<\/b><\/a>, already upgraded, display 250 entries at a time, unless you use the pull-down menu to request the full list.<\/p>\n

There’s a search box, as well; if you’re looking for just titles with the name “Batman” in them, it’ll limit to that.<\/p>\n

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Beyond that, we’ve added some cosmetic and informational updates. Table entries appear in alternating colors, with a mouse-over highlight. And while we don’t as yet have the capacity to output title histories (there are several complicated reasons for that), there are a couple of methods now for determining what book you’re looking at the record for. Comics title links initiate a search for\u00a0 the title and issue number at MyComicShop.com, while graphic novel links do the same for books at Amazon. (And yes, Comichron does earn a small amount as an affiliate from purchases made in both places; it’s all put back into the hosting of the site and the development of new research collections. Reader purchases at MyComicShop for the last several years have gone directly into purchases of comics to complete our Statement of Ownership data collection.) Links atop each table also lead to the Comic Shop Locator Service.<\/p>\n

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There’s one more step that’s been made a lot easier by the change: presenting the monthly sales report in the blog, previously the arduous by-hand final step in the process. And that brings us back to December 2016, and the following aggregate data:<\/p>\n