{"id":4940,"date":"2013-02-08T17:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T17:54:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T15:41:05","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T20:41:05","slug":"january-2013-comics-sales-beat-december","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/08\/january-2013-comics-sales-beat-december\/","title":{"rendered":"January 2013 comics sales beat December by largest margin in decade"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In a move that<\/p>\n

sent me back to the archives to examine its scale, comics shop orders of comic books and collected editions from Diamond Comic Distributors <\/i><\/b><\/a>jumped more than 27%, or nearly $9 million, year-over-year in January. And this January even beat December’s total by 3%, the largest margin for January over December in at least a decade. And it did it with one shipping week tied behind its back.<\/p>\n

This is important, because the first thing we look at in moves of this scale is whether we’re comparing a five-ship-week month to a four-ship-week month. But despite the calendar, January is a four shipping week month, just like January 2012<\/a> (which itself was a huge month for sales). That’s because, as noted last month<\/b><\/a>, possibly to adjust for Diamond taking Christmas week off<\/b><\/a>, material that left its warehouses during the week after Christmas was counted as part of December, even though it had an on-sale date of January 2.<\/p>\n

That was the first thing I looked at when I saw this change, but Dan Manser<\/b>, Diamond’s director of marketing, confirmed to me that “Jan. 2 items were invoiced in December, so they were part of December’s numbers.” The January figures are really for the for weeks that followed, and they beat December by more than a million dollars overall. Orders are estimated to have topped $41 million for the first time in any January since probably 1994 or 1995.<\/p>\n

The aggregate changes:<\/p>\n