Mayo Report for 2015-05
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Top Comics List Top Comics Breakdown Top Trades List Top Trades Breakdown
May 2015 was the second highest dollar total for the top 300 comics at $33,335,662.70 at full retail price, only $384,527.12 behind last month. Marvel accounted for 47.52% of that total, DC another 26.26% with the other publishers on the list accounting for the remaining 26.22% of the total dollars. Ten item sold over 100,000 units into retailers and two of those were over 500,000 units.
Marvel's portion of the top 300 comics amounted to $15,839,779.23 which sets a new record during the final order era when Diamond first started tracking invoiced orders to retailers in March 2003. The previous high dollar total for Marvel was $14,999,763.98 in January 2015. The lowest dollar total for Marvel's portion of the top 300 comics was $6,078,307.79 back in June 2003.
Marvel had seven of the top ten bestselling comics with "Secret Wars" #1 leading the pack with 527,678. There were many promotions involving variant cover editions of the first issue sales which helped boost the sales well beyond the norm for even a highly successful Marvel event miniseries. "Secret Wars" #2 dropped just over 60% from the first issue down to 210,807 units which is still highly successful.
Thanks to LootCrate, BOOM! Studios had the second bestselling comic in May with "Bravest Warriors: Tales of Holo John" #1 with 502,737 units. The previous best-selling BOOM! Studios title was "Regular Show" #1 with 38,466 units in May 2013. Bulk sales through LootCrate are highly unlikely to yield repeat sales on the subsequent issue. The drop on "Orphan Black" from 497,002 units on the first issue which was included in a LootCrate box down to the 10,652 units on the following issue which was not part of a LootCrate promotion reflects the difference in the type of sales, not any sort of sales trend within the direct market. BOOM! Studios only had another 92,704 units on the top 300 comics list across 12 other items. "Bravest Warriors: Tales of Holo John" #1 was a one-shot. While the "Bravest Warriors" title might see a bump, it is unlikely BOOM! Studios will see sales like that again until they do another LootCrate promotion.
"Convergence" #5 and #6 were the only to DC items in the top ten with only a few thousand units over 100,000 units. The miniseries finished a few hundred units below 100,000 units with a very slight bump in sales on the final issue of only 83 units. Sometimes the final issue of an event series like "Convergence" goes up in sales because people want to know how things end and what the new status quo is going to be.
Normally, the pre-order system self-corrects within a few months. Since the Convergence event only lasted for two months, there wasn't time for the self-correction to take place. The main "Convergence" miniseries sold between 143,053 units and 106,131 units with each issues selling less than the previous into retailers.
With only two issues per miniseries, doing a trend analysis of the various miniseries is a bit pointless. Given the similarities and differences of some of the different miniseries which featured the same characters at different points in the DC publishing timeline, figuring out a coherent grouping of titles is likewise problematic as is comparing the Convergence titles to the current New 52 and DC You titles. Here are the sales of the first and second issues of the various Convergence miniseries first in descending order of units of the first issue, then alphabetically and finally ordered from the lowest percentage drop from the first to second issue to the largest percentage drop.
The drop in sales on "Convergence" and the 40 related miniseries reflects how the retailers expected the titles to do, not how it sold for them. Simply put, the retailers didn't have enough time to react to how readers were or were not buying the titles. By the time a retailer knew how his customers were liking or disliking the event, it was pretty much over. The risk to the retailers should become clear. Preordering DC titles for April and May has been an interesting challenge for retailers as the recent sales information they have was of questionable use. Likewise, preordering the Secret Wars spin-off titles over at Marvel had similar challenges.
Remember, the sales reported here are sales from publishers to retailers through Diamond, not from retailers to readers. Personally, I'm a little concerned retailers might have a number of copies of a fair number of the "Convergence" spin-off title sitting unsold on the shelves. To know how the "Convergence" event did for the retailers, we'd need point of sales information to be gathered and analyzed. I'm interested in doing that gathering and analyzing of the point of sales data if there are retailers willing to provide the data. As useful as the Diamond is, an analysis of reader sales habits as captured through the point of sales systems of multiple retailers would be significantly more useful and insightful. Ultimately, the retailer orders are a guess at what the reader sales are going to be. By analyzing the reader sales across different retailers, we could get a much better understanding of what readers are buying and how retailers might be able to better anticipate the demand on future items. Hopefully the results of such analysis could lowering the retailer risk when pre-ordering comics two or three month in advance. Right now, retailers seem to be in a challenging time and I'd like to help them out if I can. Again, this is a project I'm interesting in working on if some retailers would be willing to share their point of sales data with me.
