It’s surprising more people aren’t talking about this.good post….

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[url=http://chattare-sul-web.blogspot.com/]chattare[/url]

Actually, Rich Johnston reports today in LITG that inker John Lucas confirmed (back in November on a podcast, if you can believe it) that EXTERMINATORS will be gone with #30.

“Who goes to Comic-Con for comics?! Seriously.”

I admit it. I’m going primarily so I can go out to the drive-in theater in Santee.

And that’s 7.3 times the total sales for Shadowpact.

Who goes to Comic-Con for comics?! Seriously.

“Man….cloudy skies in DC land.”
—–
Yep, Mark, the sky is falling. DC is going bankrupt and will be out of business within a year. Then the whole market will crash. Editors will be jumping off high-rise buildings.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/1850.html

That said, to be frank, I don’t think you can get a lot of mileage out of them, since (a) we’ve got no idea how the books are doing outside the direct market, (b) we ultimately won’t even know total sales in the direct market, once they drop out of the Top 100, and (c) they’re one-shot releases rather than parts of a series, so there are no previous or subsequent volumes with which to compare their first-month sales.

All those numbers tell us for certain is that both books are doing very, very well in the direct market. And I did that.

*sob*

Nobody ever reads the introduction.

I know it’s beyond the scope of the this column as a whole, but to me the biggest two sales success of DC for November weren’t even mentioned. The Heroes book and LOEG: Black Dossier. The success of those books compared to the periodical sales might have made for an interesting analysis.

And that’s 7.3 times the total sales for Shadowpact.

I’ve done a bit of that here:
http://comiksdebris.blogspot.com/2007/11/collection-business.html

“Marc how many of these books do you actually read?”

Not many. Frankly, while promotional stunts (such as crossovers, variant cover editions and the like) or creative team changes tend to have noticeable effects on sales, the stories themselves rarely indicate anything beyond whether people like them or not - and for most books, they don’t even indicate that much, most of the time.

If a book drops by two percent points for three months in a row, that doesn’t mean people don’t like the stories. It’s simply what books tend to do. So I’ll always at least skim the solicitation copy, but there are numerous factors more relevant to sales than plots or storytelling.

“It’s possible that the blip in sales of Booster Gold aren’t from issue 3 dropping more than expected, but rather issue 2 being seen as a de facto Sinestro Corps crossover and getting a sales boost from that.”

That explanation makes sense, I think.

“I’m not really sure it bears mentioning that Ra’s Al Ghul is “working”…working to do what? To prop up the sales of peripheral titles for *one issue*? Does that really matter to DC? To anyone?”

Well, but that’s what crossovers do, traditionally - they’re short-term sales boosters. I presume it matters to Marvel and DC, or they would stop doing it.

“Marc, do you expect that Robin and Nightwing will be able to hold on to some of the crossover increase? Especially with creative team changes for both coming up?”

I don’t think so, no. Unless there are some drastic, lasting effects on those titles from the crossover that we’re not privy to yet, I don’t see them retaining any of the additional sales.

And, with all due respect to the new creative teams, I don’t think they’ll make much of a difference to sales, either. Perhaps ROBIN will stay slightly ahead of its previous level for an issue due to Chuck Dixon’s history with the character, but I don’t expect any significant trend reversals for either title.

As far as the impact of the Ra’s crossover, I don’t expect it to last, but a one or two month sales boost is still money in DC’s pockets. I wouldn’t say that was a major hit as a crossover, but it is at least a minor success.

There are a couple ways of looking at this, though. November 2006 was a month with 5 Wednesdays, which meant five issues of 52 totaling sales of about 515,000. Subtract about 100,000 from the miniseries total for November and the percentage goes down to around 27%.

Discount both 52 and Countdown entirely and miniseries sales from Nov 2006 are 16% of the total while miniseries sales from Nov 2007 are 24% of the total.

I’d like to do the same comparison with the sales charts from 2005 but they seem to have mysteriously disappeared, so eh.

Something to chew on, anyway.

Later I think I’m going to do a little research into whether or not there’s a precedent for such a significant amount of DC’s sales being from limited series.

Historically, we pretty much know that sales return back to pre-crossover levels in 99% of the cases.

Marc, do you expect that Robin and Nightwing will be able to hold on to some of the crossover increase? Especially with creative team changes for both coming up?

If not, what is it that is really working? A month’s blip and that’s all? I’d kind of wave that one off myself.

I’m going to be very interested in next month’s numbers for GLC in comparison with Robin and Nightwing. All of them are concluding crossovers this month, and I think there’s actually a decent chance that GLC might be able to hold on to some of the War readership, whereas I’m not holding out much hope for Nightwing and Robin.

I think GLC has a chance to retain some of the readership for two reasons: 1) the crossover has been fairly long and has kept people buying the lower-selling title for a decent length of time and 2) there’s another crossover in the horizon for 2009, so if people anticipate GL and GLC to be crossing over for that one too, they may hang in there with GLC until Blackest Night.

I am hoping that if GLC manages to hold on to some of the readership, publishers might realize that pre-hyping another upcoming crossover while you’re coming out of one might be a successful tactic to keep reader interest piqued in the interim.

But we’ll only know for sure next month. (Well, later this month.)