And I kind of assumed 300 saw an increase in sales due to the movie tie-in, not from some formula of crafting the comics themselves.

The poor fellow kind of took up the shovel and deepened a hole I may not have noticed otherwise.

Yes, because anyone ever employed by Gary Groth has obviously been replaced by a robot only capable of groupthink. Sheesh. Why people bear such a grudge against TCJ and FBI I can never figure out though my guess is either they got a bad review in the journal or the journal just doesn’t cover the books they like (in which case I would recommend any of the excellent Two Morrows publications such as Back Issue because complaining the Journal doesn’t give nicer reviews to Big 2 books is like wondering why The New Yorker doesn’t give positive reviews to books by Steven King or Tom Clancy). Dirk and his blog hardly represent the opinions of Fantagraphics Books, mostly because if they did the Journal would be all-shoujo manga all the time.

And if Dirk has never been wrong about anything how do we explain away his many corrections? And NO, despite my defense of Dirk I am no sycophant (in fact, I am often bothered that due to his libertarianism he often acts as if Democrats and Republicans are just two sides of the same coin which is a notion I think doesn’t do justice to the current level of corruption and incompetance in the administration and it’s rubber stamp Congressional delegation and this often colors Dirk’s writing when issues of politics come up in the blog or at the TCJ message board). I just think TCJ gets a bad wrap from people who don’t even read it. In fact, the false notion that TCJ only gives good reviews to books published by Fantagraphics is dispelled by Dirk in today’s column (of was it yesterday?) where he mentions being shunned in San Diego by Jaime Hernandez after editing and publishing a negative review of his work.

In my world, only thing that matters is dollars. If I can sell one copy of a book at $100,000, I’m happy.

300 is a huge success. By May this book will have moved over 300,000 copies at $30 per. Nice.

Naruto is a phenomenon. There are 13 volumes, each one selling hundred of thousands of copies. I don’t know the actual figures but I’d bet Naruto brings in close to $15 million a year for Viz. Nice.

As for NYT bestseller list calculation, I can’t say anything in print ’cause I’ll get in trouble. Let’s just say it’s all politics, has nothing to do with what actually sells. If you want to know more ask me about why The Hobbit didn’t make the list after selling 10 million copies when the moves came out.

“… the _New York Times_ submits a list of 36 titles (those which their editors think will be bestselling titles for that week) to about 3,000 bookstores across the country These stores are asked to fill in the number of copies of each title they sold during that week. In addition, there is a space at the end of the lists where stores can write in good-selling titles that didn’t make the suggested list. Each week, these reports are compiled, wighted by region, and reported in the _New York Times Book Review_.

“If a book is not selected for the Times’ suggested list of 36 titles, it has no chance to make the bestseller list that week since few bookstores bother to write in titles.”

Kremer however recommends publishers do everything they can to get their books on lists like this, because they are influential despite being heavily biased.

Heidi, you should know by now that no one who works for The Journal or Fantagraphics could ever be wrong about anything…ever. I mean ever.