TITLING @ WINDMILLS: LOOKING AT BOOKSCAN 2007

[MattBrady]

by Brian Hibbs

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”

Call me Mr. Squinty.

For the fifth year in a row, I’m going to try to figure out something that can only vaguely be seen and perceived: the size and shape of the sales of books through the book store market, as seen through the prism of BookScan.

Some preamble:

“Direct Market” stores (also known as “your Local Comics Shop”) buy much of their material for resale from Diamond Comics Distributors (though, not, by any means, all – and many DM stores are also buying from book distributors). DM stores seldom have Point-of-Sales (POS) systems (though this is rapidly changing!!!), and, because we buy non-returnable, what we track is in our side of the industry is what sells-in to the store, not what sells-through to the eventual consumer. In a very real way, this means that the DM store owner is the actual customer of the publisher, as opposed to the end consumer.

The bookstore market, however, buys their material returnable, where they can send back some portion of titles that don’t sell. Because of this, sell-through is the data that is tracked and trended. Bookstores that have POS systems are able to report their sales to BookScan, a subsidiary of Nielsen.

Each week, BookScan generates a series of reports detailing the specific sales to consumers through its client stores. The category we are most interested in is “adult fiction overall graphic novels”. Given that the numbers are Nielsen’s we can’t reproduce them complete, so you’ll just have to trust me that it says what I say it says, alright?

Click here for the full column.

[Nat Gertler]

But... but... I read on the Internet that the direct market is a dead dinosaur and all the real comics sold in bookstores, where books sell a lot. And it must be true. They wouldn't let it on the Internet if it wasn't true, would they?

[Brian Hibbs]

Just for the record, the decision to not present the actual report, and only print the analysis, was Newsarama's, and not mine. (Matt changed my wording a little bit there)

-B

[thefourthman]

Good job Brian, thanks for making clear what is obvious to good DM's. One day we will have real world numbers, but until then this seems like the best way to go about it.

[thefourthman]

Oh yeah one other thing as to the digests of Marvel product... I can attest that they sell if they are in stock at diamond, I have massive problems restocking MA Spidey and Runaways... along with the Sonic Archives and The SW Clone Wars Adventures. These all sell all the time. But for example, V. 2 of Runaways was not available from diamond for close to three whole months last year, hurting my ability to keep the customers coming in the door and the dollars heading my way.

[Davy]

A word which may or may not explain the slowdown on Naruto manga this year. The main reason they published so many this year (27 you say?) was because the manga had been passed up by the anime on CN, and many folks like me were skipping the manga because we'd seen that basic story online. So Viz mass-shipped enough to catch back up with/surpass the cartoon. Then they can get to the Naruto: Shippuuden series, which takes place 3 years later and which fans here won't have read. So maybe when they get to those issues things will change? Not sure, but I know that's why I stopped reading the manga.

D.

[ex_mutants]

Just a minor thing, when Brian mentions that anime shows are driving the sales of manga, Fruits Basket is and hasn't been on TV. It has good DVD sales, but has never been on TV.

On a side note, most anime on TV is shonen, or for boys. Fruit Baskets is clearly a shojo show (for girls) and the last shojo anime on american TV was Sailor Moon.

Also Death Note was a strong seller before the anime hit american TV. That was mostly just due to buzz in the manga and anime community.

[Brian Hibbs]

Originally Posted by ex_mutants

Just a minor thing, when Brian mentions that anime shows are driving the sales of manga, Fruits Basket is and hasn't been on TV. It has good DVD sales, but has never been on TV.

On a side note, most anime on TV is shonen, or for boys. Fruit Baskets is clearly a shojo show (for girls) and the last shojo anime on american TV was Sailor Moon.

Also Death Note was a strong seller before the anime hit american TV. That was mostly just due to buzz in the manga and anime community.

Like I said, my working knowledge of anime is very (very!) weak, but I *can* say that DEATH NOTE was a "decent" seller in 2006, but "exploded" in 2007, which corresponds to the anime being broadcast.

(I really really like DEATH NOTE, as well, one of the few manga series that I followed personally)

-B

[Alan Coil]

After Brian has analyzed all this data, I can envision his dreams for the week after as being a wall of numbers in luminescent green ala The Matrix.

[cleazer]

$22 million for DC and $20 million for Marvel, sounds pretty even to me. Especially considering that DC has a slightly larger backlist. Though I guess it's only the big sellers that really count, not stuff like Marville.

(And thanks for sharing that Marville tidbit by the way!)

[funjoe]

1) My 7 year old niece, who I can not get to read a comic from Marvel/DC to save my life, LOVES Babymouse.

2) I am somewhat surprised the Dark Tower collection didn't do better. How do those numbers compare to average sales for the actual (individual) prose Dark Tower books?

3) I think the relatively low sales for Whedon's collections in bookstores may stem from the fact that it seems people either love Joss Whedon or don't know who he is. I imagine a majority of the people in the former category are picking up the Buffy issues as they come out, and for the latter his name (or Buffy's) mean nothing.

[johnnyrocket]

Fascinating as usual. I enjoy these articles from Brian becasue there's always numbers provided to back up opinion.

I'm really looking forward to the next 'Tilting' which should be about BND sales numbers.

[magister]

Definitely poorer for not having the list attached. I'm always curious, for example, the non-Stephen King, mainstream authors do in the bookstores. Can't supplement when its not up.

[JimShelley]

As always, your columns and analysis just floor me! Quite a bit of nice revelations with this one particularly the bits about how the DM beats out the Bookstores for such things as Vertigo and Minx, and the surprising success of superhero oriented materials.

Excellent work!

[Not From Around]

Fantastic piece of analysis, with lots of food for thought!

Since many of the "humor" books appear to have been reclassified away, their absence would explain part of the slowdown in growth noted for last year.

It's interesting to note that DC has been outselling Marvel in the bookstore market. I wonder whether when all is said and done DC's publishing arm hasn't been matching or even outselling Marvel's, even though they are perennially in second place in the DM? It does look like Marvel's catching up, though.

"Watchmen" is still selling tens of thousands of copies a year? That's certainly robust back-list sales!

Vertigo titles clearly do indeed make a big part of their revenue in trades, both in the DM and beyond. People who only look at month-to-month periodical charts need to bear this in mind.

It's good to see the acknowledgement here of the library market, a substantial and growing market that's hard to track. I can tell Brian that the Marvel/DC digests do indeed sell to libraries and book fairs. I bought my first "Spider-Girl" digest at a book fair, as a matter of fact. I wonder whether perhaps the Minx titles are selling there? Hard to tell. I haven't been buying them, but I have bought quite a few Marvel and DC digests of various kinds for the library. Mostly I get them straight from Baker & Taylor, so you wouldn't see them in the Bookscan figures.

Library and academic sales probably help out the "art comics" quite a bit. I'm sure they don't sell big numbers to these markets, but some of them probably have proportionately more of their sales in these markets than most comics do. Well-known graphic novels sell a lot to the library market as well. "Persepolis" has really been a darling of the library profession's recommended lists.

[Faraway Press]

Minor note on the TPB dollars in the direct market — the category that was up 18% in 2007 was the 12 monthly lists of Top 100 trades (which combined are somewhat less than 1200 items). Including the "long tail" at Diamond, the Comics Chronicles calculations suggest that the overall TPB category growth was somewhat slower than 18% at Diamond -- maybe closer to 10%.

I estimate they did $430 million in comics, trades, and magazines overall in 2007; minus $270 mil for the 12 monthly Top 300 comics lists, that's $160 million in sales for for trades, magazines, and below-the-charts comics. In 2006, the figures are $396 million overall minus $252 million for the ranked comics, leaving $144 million for the trades, mags, and miscellaneous comics. So the non-Top 300 comics grouping, which includes all Diamond TPB sales, did about 11% better.

We don't have a way of knowing exactly how much of that $160 million was trade paperbacks in 2007 -- but I expect that it is most of it; magazine orders are unlikely to be above $12 million annually, and it's mathematically hard for the comics worse than 300th place each month to account for a huge amount. But we can guess that the stronger year-over-year growth in the trade paperback category was in that monthly top-sellers list. Regardless, as Brian indicates, either way you look at it, the direct market's sales growth rate was better.

What does that mean? There are different ways to look at it, but increasingly it looks like one of the worries I heard from a few retailers in the 1990s, that broad mass market TPB availability would cannibalize shop sales, hasn't happened.

[Snowspinner]

Surely much of the slowing growth can be attributed to the removal of the "humor" category from the charts, no? Had they charted at a number even close to the 2006 numbers, it seems like that would have made it double digit growth again.

[Earth2Comics]

John:

The Diamond estimates you are using, is that $430 million in retail value, or what DCD's gorss sales were at wholesale prices?

Thanks.

Carr

[Faraway Press]

Full retail value. We have no way of knowing what DCD actuallty realized from the charts they publish, since their customers buy at different discounts.

The usual caveats apply — the Diamond figures are books sold to retailers, not to customers, which the Bookscan numbers certainly are.

[Brian Hibbs]

Originally Posted by magister

Definitely poorer for not having the list attached. I'm always curious, for example, the non-Stephen King, mainstream authors do in the bookstores. Can't supplement when its not up.

If you mean "how did Joss Whedon or Neil Gaiman comics do and/or how did the George RR Martin, Laura Hamilton, etc. spinoffs do", pretty much everything that appeared in the Top 750 should have been commented upon in the article. I might have missed one or two, but I think I got them all.

If you mean "How does Stephen King, etc. non-comics do" then I'm afraid I don't know either -- I only see the comics portions of the list

-B

[Brian Hibbs]

Originally Posted by Faraway Press

Minor note on the TPB dollars in the direct market — the category that was up 18% in 2007 was the 12 monthly lists of Top 100 trades (which combined are somewhat less than 1200 items). Including the "long tail" at Diamond, the Comics Chronicles calculations suggest that the overall TPB category growth was somewhat slower than 18% at Diamond -- maybe closer to 10%.

JJ:

Maybe I'm dumb, but how CAN you even come close to calculating the Long Tail at Diamond? I don't see any data points they provide that would allow that calculation?

(and, as noted, there's more than 10% of the Top 100 year-end list that NEVER appeared on ANY monthly list, which would suggest to me that the Long Tail *could* be deeper for books/GNs)

-B

[Somebody]

Originally Posted by Brian Hibbs

Just for the record, the decision to not present the actual report, and only print the analysis, was Newsarama's, and not mine. (Matt changed my wording a little bit there)

-B

Could you put it up at your site then? Some of us would like to see it

[Faraway Press]

Originally Posted by Brian Hibbs

JJ: Maybe I'm dumb, but how CAN you even come close to calculating the Long Tail at Diamond? I don't see any data points they provide that would allow that calculation.

This is a separate calculation from the order-index number or "magic number" trick we've been able to do since these charts began, 20 years ago now.

Diamond reports "final order" market shares, carving up the total number of units and dollars of comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines it sells -- those are the ones we most frequently see. These total figures can be unlocked if you have the complete monthly order report Diamond generates for publishers -- that report contains not just the month's new titles, but every single product sold, down to single copies of comics and trades issued years ago. By dividing the total sales of a publisher on the list by its market share, you derive the overall sales.

I have confirmed the accuracy of this method in different ways over the years, but the most public confirmation came last year in this report, in which Diamond itself said it had sold $385 million in comics and graphic novels in 2006. My estimate was $395 million. Subtracting out magazines, that's pretty close to dead on target. That same Diamond report suggested $335 million for 2005; my number was $352 million. A wider gap there, but magazine sales were also likely higher then.

As far as I know, I have been the only source for this particular calculation since I started running it in February 2002 -- but I think it is a useful one. It does, however, result in some delays sometimes in my calculations -- since I need not just the "magic number" for the month but the complete publisher's audit.

[Jamie Coville]

Brian,

Did any of the Showcases or Essentials come up? I see them in local bookstores in Canada and I wonder if they are selling at all in book stores.

[Brian Hibbs]

Originally Posted by Jamie Coville

Brian,

Did any of the Showcases or Essentials come up? I see them in local bookstores in Canada and I wonder if they are selling at all in book stores.

Not in the top 750, no.

The highest Essential is in the 3500-ish range, while Showcase is about 2800. They both drop precipitously from there.

I was going to say something about it being "US only", but looking at the BookScan website, I'm less than sure -- what it says is (quote) Market Coverage

BookScan provides continuous measurement, tracking and analysis of book sales around the world. BookScan operates in seven countries, spanning four continents: UK, Ireland, US, Australia, Italy, Spain, South Africa and New Zealand (due to launch late 2007). (Quote)

so I really don't know, as that isn't especially clear....

-B