www.ComicBookPage.com

Hibb's Bookscan numbers (charting actual sales of books that report to Nielsen’s Bookscan sales chart) for graphic novels are pretty illuminating

if you have ever questioned why folks write for the trade or publishers put out so many trades you can check out the article here with a link to the top 750 sales here:
http://www.comicsbeat.com/women-and-chi ... vel-sales/

here is a glance at top image sales for 2014 (i guess one would add these to diamond numbers to get a total sales number or closer to one??)

68,064 WALKING DEAD COMPENDIUM 1 (chart shows Gross revenues of OVER $7 million just for these two compendiums)
53,470 WALKING DEAD COMPENDIUM V 2 TP
45,316 WALKING DEAD V 20 ALL OUT WAR
38,416 SAGA V 3
36,303 WALKING DEAD V 21 ALL OUT WAR
33,856 SAGA V 1 TP
31,525 WALKING DEAD V1 DAYS GONE BYE
25,878 WALKING DEAD V 19
25,230 SAGA V 2 TP
24,459 WALKING DEAD V 22 A NEW BEGINN
18,971 WALKING DEAD BK 1
18,938 WALKING DEAD V 2 MILES BEHIND
16,264 WALKING DEAD V18
14,174 WALKING DEAD V 3 SAFETY BEHIND
14,020 SEX CRIMINALS V 1
13,464 WALKING DEAD VOL 17 TP
13,357 SAGA V 4
13,219 WALKING DEAD BK 10
11,492 WALKING DEAD BK 2
10,652 WALKING DEAD V4 HEARTS DESIRE
10,453 WALKING DEAD BK 9

Yep, Heidi has said this years big winner was Raina Telgemeier. With her selling over 400,000 of her three books combined (and not at $2.99....these are $10-$15 a pop) just in the bookstore market, you can see why publishers like Scholastic and First Second are popular for artists. If you make comics that really appeal to kids and teens, the market is enormous. It has always baffled me seeing the books marketed at kids in the direct market sell 4,000-5,000 and get canceled after 12 issues. Even for Image, kids books are a tough sell in the direct market. When you see these numbers in the bookstore market, I wonder if its just a marketing problem in the direct market or if the price for content ($2.99/$3.99 for 20 pages of story) drives parents to standalone books like Telgemeier's Sisters, which is a 208 page full color paperback with no adds for $10.99 retail ($7.85 on amazon). I understand that Scholastic can charge less per book as they are doing huge print runs (multiple hundreds of thousands for their biggest titles), but there is some big disconnect with this huge disparity in sales between the two markets.

TJ602 wrote:When you see these numbers in the bookstore market...there is some big disconnect with this huge disparity in sales between the two markets.

i wonder if that is just how the industry works now...

1. create a 5 part comic story
2. sell it digitally - zero barrier to entry- hope it sells some
3. use your digital sales to pitch print to comic publishers as viable-hope it sells some more
4. use comic sales to package as trade to booksellers show those sales as viability, sell a bunch
5. count up those fat stacks o' cash