{"id":4489,"date":"2016-02-05T18:02:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:02:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-31T19:07:46","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T00:07:46","slug":"walking-dead-150-star-wars-trades-lead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/05\/walking-dead-150-star-wars-trades-lead\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking Dead #150, Star Wars trades lead traditionally light January comics sales volume"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/CCWD150\"Sales volumes in January tend to be lower than most months of the year, and as such, a single comic book can make a huge difference. Particularly when that comic book was the best-selling one in more than twenty years\u2014as <\/i>Star Wars <\/i>#1<\/b><\/a> was, last January. Comic shop orders for comic books, graphic novels, and magazines in January 2016 were off 5% versus a year before according to Diamond Comic Distributors<\/b><\/a> \u2014 but if Star Wars<\/i> #1 hadn’t been in the mix in January 2015, sales would have been up 7%!<\/p>\n

In truth, the market may really be slightly down, flat, or evenslightly up this month, because Star Wars <\/i>#1’s sales included a lot of copies that went to Loot Crate<\/b>, where Diamond was simply passing along the books; they shouldn’t really have counted toward the industry’s dollar sales, but there’s no way to easily excise them. But we know that retailers placed orders worth approximately $41.52 million last month, off about $2.2 million \u2014 and sources suggest Loot Crate’s order could have accounted for 400,000 copies or more. Figuring at $4.99 per issue, that’s at least $2 million right there.<\/p>\n

And unit sales for comic books, off 4.09% for the month, are almost certainly up if you remove the Loot Crate Star Wars<\/i> copies. So accounting for the accounting, so to speak, the message of the month is somewhat more positive than the numbers below suggest:<\/p>\n

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