2015-03-17

Various new charts

Brian Hibbs has his analysis of the 2014 Bookscan charts in his Tilting at Windmills column, including a link to a spreadsheet of the top 750 comics.

ICV2 has their Bookscan Top 20 for February up now. Note for those comparing past charts, this particular chart was recently changed to include non-fiction, so now includes several books (those by Roz Chast and John Lewis this month) which wouldn't have been included before.

The February 2015 Diamond numbers are also up at the usual places, including Comichron. See sidebar for links to the other usual charts and articles.

A few quick notes on the Diamond numbers, since I probably won't get around to any longer post this month. Obviously, as noted everywhere, the ORPHAN BLACK debut at #1 with 497k is almost entirely due to it being included in Loot Crate. For comparison, the previous highest selling IDW book was MY LITTLE PONY FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC #1 in 2012, at 80k. Also, note that it only ranked #3 in Diamond's Dollar Rank, indicating a higher than normal discount off cover price (previous Loot Crate propelled #1 books outsold the other books that month by such a margin that a higher discount wouldn't be evident).

It would be incredibly surprising if #2 sells more than 10% of what #1 did. Which means the 84% drop that STAR WARS #2 posted probably won't last as the highwater mark for second issue drops (if you ignore books with promotionally priced $1 first issues). Second issues as a whole dropped an average of 35%.

The Top 300 Graphic Novels chart was almost evenly split, 152 new items, 148 backlist, which seems to be about normal now in months where there's no evidence of massive backlist sales from Marvel or DC. There are around 90 books which you can count on to chart almost every month (I'll try to update that list this month), not too many surprises overall.