I should say that the point I was trying to make (obviously not adequately!) isn’t that readers of Civil War should/could be reading Action Philosophers (although I’m sure there are some). Rather it is that, while the audience for Civil War and the other top books are getting them, there is a much larger potential audience for books like Action Philosophers that for whatever reason isn’t being met via Diamond.

And don’t beat up on poor Heidi for “inflection point”; the mistake in terminology is all mine. I guess it should be “the point at which the data begins to deviate from the expected values” or something like that.

But nevertheless, the point is made.

Here’s a link to a post from ten years ago this week GoogleGroups

I’m not sure that Civil War to Action Philosophers is an example I’d use, but I’m pretty sure a few people have read Kirkman’s Ultimate X-Men and then picked up Walking Dead or Invicible. The original example is with books on mountain climbing, IIRC.

Civil War bringing up Black Panther and She-Hulk sales would be valid, although more valid if the sales would stay elevated _after_ the cross-over ends.

Anyone care to do one of those graphs for, say, 1992 and see where it goes?

Happy Birthday!

Love,
Your Fans

p.s. Cool graphs.

…like I do.

Sorry, I’m a math geek, not an English composition geek.

Unless business folks use the term differently than math geeks like me do.

At the time, I was interested in seeing what exactly affected the market place, such as variant covers, new #1 issues, new creative teams, that sort. There was a whole market analysis that someone could probably prove with a lot of charts and graphs with the cumulative data, but I’ll list a few of my conclusions made back then that probably still hold a bit of water:

There’s at least three tiers of comics: I broke them down into
The Top 25
The Next 50
The Rest

Each of the groups had similar sales decline charts, where — if there were no “#1 issue, variant covers, new creative team or new storyline” issues, you could pretty well guess what the next month’s sales would be. If I could do it with Matt’s estimated numbers, you can guess the publishers could too.

A new launch of a title is a lot like Opening Day for a big movie premiere. That initial order is very important, because it determines the decline curve. Oh, some fall offs were steeper than others, and predictably by the 6 issue the sales patterns were very much locked into place. Everyone used to talk a lot about how the sales numbers didn’t reflect the re-orders, but those were the exceptions - you might assume that if one particular issue was reordered in any significant numbers the presales orders would then go up accordingly, which they rarely did. So, in the long run, the presales numbers show trends fairly accurately, even if the hard numbers are above that curve by some measure. (Granted, with some “low selling” titles in the 25-75 sales rank range, that unknown number of extra sales could be enough to keep the title profitable when to the outside it might look like cancellation time)

The Top 25 (and that “25″ mark isn’t a hard and fixed number, but seemed right on the mark for quite some time) were certainly the titles that got the most attention, and were the most likely to get advertisements to keep their sales high — High cost, high reward. I’m pretty convinced that Spawn was kept up in the sales ranks by sheer advertisements for a while, keeping fans buying long after the real interest went elsewhere. For example, if there were almost no advertisements and no promotion, which title would fall the most in sales, and which would remain high? Individual titles/creative teams had varying amounts of sales inertia. Again, this is for smarter brains than what I posess to divine. I just noted there was something there.

The next 50 were titles that for the most live off of whatever sales inertia (read: loyal buyers) they have and were the least affected by promotional events (a variant cover would not create a new higher benchmark of sales for any new decline curve, but would just be a two month noise blip in sales) Many of these were DC comics.

The Rest. All the way down to the #300 in sales, where the creation usually fell on teams that owned their own characters, and sometimes controlled their own publishing distribution. Promotion and #1 sales reboots would be almost useless here, and sales at conventions/store appearances would provide as much or more income as any sales noted through the Diamond catalog. This was the real “Long Tail” of the comic book business.

The question “Why decline curve?” might come up, and the answer to that is complex in detail, but in reality, pretty simple. Comic books are sequential art forms and by nature provide an ongoing adventure told through successive issues. Miss last year’s LOST on TV? Grab the DVD on sale! Catch up. There is no similar feature with comic books.

People find it hard to catch up with sequentially told stories. They fall away. Prose authors are cautioned not to make a book series where reading the first book is mandatory for reading the second and third. By the time the fourth book is out, the first book is hard to find. The author might be popular, but the nature of the series makes it hard to pick up the story in the middle. So, as old fans drop off, no new fans are acquired.

In other words, movie ticket sales decline and comic book sales decline, but for completely different reasons.