{"id":5879,"date":"2009-01-05T16:33:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T16:33:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-28T03:08:13","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T03:08:13","slug":"challenge-of-january-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/05\/challenge-of-january-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"The challenge of January, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on the last post<\/span><\/a> about January in comics, I ran a quick check on something we don’t always look at. I focus mostly on year-over-year changes \u2014 this December versus last December, that sort of thing \u2014 because there tends to be a lot of volatility from month to month with books that don’t ship or double-ship. A better way to handle those kinds of micro-trend analyses is to look across a title, like John Mayo does<\/span><\/a> and like we did with the Standard Catalogs<\/span><\/a>, rather than by the calendar.<\/p>\n

Still, the mention of December-to-January drops raises the question of what kinds of drops we’re talking about. So here’s the estimated change within the Top 300 comics dollar sales <\/span>from December to January from 1997 to 2007:<\/p>\n

December 1996 to January 1997: -15.3%
\nDecember 1997 to January 1998: -27.7%
\nDecember 1998 to January 1999: -15.2%
\nDecember 1999 to January 2000: -18.5%
\nDecember 2000 to January 2001: -8.9%
\nDecember 2001 to January 2002: -3.6%
\nDecember 2002 to January 2003: -4.8%
\nDecember 2003 to January 2004: -19.9%
\nDecember 2004 to January 2005: -26.7%
\nDecember 2005 to January 2006: -17.0%
\nDecember 2006 to January 2007: -4.8%
\nDecember 2007 to January 2008: -7.0%<\/p>\n

And then to throw in trades, here’s the estimated total change in total direct market dollars counting all comics, trade paperbacks, and magazines sold by Diamond:<\/p>\n

December 2003 to January 2004: -23.7%
\nDecember 2004 to January 2005: -23.3%
\nDecember 2005 to January 2006: -19.1%
\nDecember 2006 to January 2007: +0.3%
\nDecember 2007 to January 2008: -3.7%<\/p>\n

\"\"That January 2007<\/span><\/a> included Civil War #6<\/span>, whereas December 2006<\/a> had no Civil War<\/span> issue (underlining what I said about month-to-month variance). I also recall some hinkiness with what ship days were included with January’s data that month. Conversely, the big January 2005 drop<\/span><\/a> comes partially from New Avengers<\/span> and Ultimates 2<\/span> launching and Identity Crisis<\/span> concluding in December 2004<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

December also sees some of the holiday-season ordering, although most of that seems to show up on November’s tallies.<\/p>\n

In any event, the historical odds are strongly with a drop, and perhaps a double-digit drop, from December to January as the traditional “dead quarter” gets underway. The dead quarter wasn’t much in evidence in some recent years, particularly year-over-year; that’s something to be hoped for this time out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on the last post about January in comics, I ran a quick check on something we don’t always look at. I focus mostly on year-over-year changes \u2014 this December versus last December, that sort of thing \u2014 because there tends to be a lot of volatility from month to month with books that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[116,78,33],"class_list":["post-5879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comics-shops","tag-dead-quarter","tag-state-of-the-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5881,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions\/5881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}