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I recently ran across the following link to DC's spring 2015 catalog on the CBR collected editions board. http://edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com/C ... gID=469426
This is a list of all of all the TPB's and HC's DC will be publishing next spring. What really caught my attention was the "announced print runs" that were listed. With the exception of the absolutes (10-15k) DC is printing between 20k-125k of their various books. From what I've learned on the Mayo Report even the top sellers rarely seem to crack 10k in the direct market. Either DC is selling a huge amount of books on Amazon and/or in bookstores or there is a warehouse somewhere stacked to the rafters with DC books. Can John tell us anything about these seemingly huge print runs? Does DC do that well outside of the direct market or is Dan Didio hoarding books?

Very interesting link. I'm not seeing the print runs you mentioned. Where are they on that page?

The numbers you mention wouldn't surprise me for some titles. The mass market sales are not part of the Diamond data so it is difficult to know how sales are in that channel.

There are a few things to keep in mind about those numbers. First, the mass market is a returnable market so it can take a larger print run in order to get the same level of actual sales compared to the direct (nonreturnable) market. Second, there is a cost associated to going to print and there are price breaks at particular levels. It is probably cheaper to print 20,000 units or more at one time figuring the shelf life of some of these trades is huge. Better to be able to supply additional units to Amazon and whomever as often as they need them out of inventory in order to minimize going back to print on smaller print runs. Third, while the top of the trades chart is usually below 10,000 there are some trades from DC which over time have sold multiple times that.

Print runs over 100,000 seem high but could make sense depending which books those are.

Thanks for your reply. The print-run info from the catalog has been removed. When the catalog was first posted it had a section marked "announced first print run" grouped in with the page count, book dimensions. etc. I can assure that besides the Absolutes nothing had a print run of under 10k. A few of the titles (Batman, JLA books had print runs of 125k). Even the Omnibus books had announced runs of over 15k.