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Posts tagged ‘retail’

It’s Christmas for Comic Retail Stats Wonks! All Twelve of Us!

Still in print? STILL IN PRINT!?

It’s the “Christmas in February” for those of you, like me, who are preternaturally obsessed with comic book retail data. Brian Hibbs 2008 “Tilting at Windmills” BookScan report is up, wherein Brian combs through the massive BookScan database to tell us what trends he sees in his crystal… excel spreadsheet.

There is some kind of book called “Watchmen”… and apparently it is still in print! Casual bookstore buyers don’t like the second volume of “Persepolis”! The Manga market is really soft! These and far more prescient insights can be yours at the link above!

2008 – A year in funnybooks

*May not be representative of most comics retailers

I actually discovered the group blog The Savage Critics because of Brian Hibbs interesting column Tilting at Windmills. There are all kinds of good blogs from the “through-the-looking-glass” world of comic-book retail – but Brian has a penchant for distilling all kinds of nit-picky retail data into a comprehensible fashion. He recently posted two quick lists of his store’s 2008 top-sellers (one for “books” and one for “comics” (“books” primarily refers to trade paperbacks and other collections not, say, prose – and “comics” refers to single-issue “floppies”… more or less).

Something fascinating struck me from Brian’s posts though. Digging through his “books” lists, I own (in some format or another) over 52% of the top 100 items from the “books” list… yet over on the “comics” list, I own less than 16% (and if you remove “DC Universe Zero” and “Trinity #1” (which I got for free from my local shop), and a couple “Astonishing X-Men” (which I bought by mistake, although ended up enjoying) that’s less than 10% I actually intentionally shelled out money for.
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