Mayo Report: 2011-01 Comics

[comicman66]

January Mayo Report:
Just a thought about sales of Fantastic Four 587; Out of the 115,000 sold, I'm thinking that most people (including me) bought (2) issues of Fantastic Four 587. So maybe only 1/2 of the 115,000 (57,500) units sold to individuals, maybe even less. I really dont think 115,00 different people actually bought the issue.
Maybe some comics shops have been closing, this also might be why sales are down. I still wish they based the sales counts on actual “sales” and not just what LCS preorder.
Any thoughts on this topic.

[BobBretall]

I'm thinking that most people (including me) bought (2) issues of Fantastic Four 587. So maybe only 1/2 of the 115,000 (57,500) units sold to individuals, maybe even less. I really dont think 115,00 different people actually bought the issue.

I agree with you that a lot of people bought 2, but not everyone. I'm thinking it may be more like 60-70% of people buying 2. Then there are the copies that are sitting unsold with jacked up prices.

I still wish they based the sales counts on actual “sales” and not just what LCS preorder.

It would be nice, but there's no practical way to do this without every retailer hooked into a point-of-sale system & being willing to share their sales data. That's not likely to happen.

[JohnMayo]

January Mayo Report:
Just a thought about sales of Fantastic Four 587; Out of the 115,000 sold, I'm thinking that most people (including me) bought (2) issues of Fantastic Four 587. So maybe only 1/2 of the 115,000 (57,500) units sold to individuals, maybe even less. I really dont think 115,00 different people actually bought the issue.
Maybe some comics shops have been closing, this also might be why sales are down. I still wish they based the sales counts on actual “sales” and not just what LCS preorder.
Any thoughts on this topic.

Obviously there are not 115,000 people that bought Fantastic Four #587. No such claim is being made by anybody about that. (At least as far as I know.)

These numbers were clearly stated n the episode to be the estimated sales through Diamond to retailers during January. We make this disclaimer at the beginning of every Mayo Report and it is repeated in the ending disclaimers.

Couple of points of clarification:

1) These sales estimates are estimates. While reasonably accurate, they could be off bit a couple of units. We are looking at trends and the margin of error is only a handful of copies and therefore not really important in the context of the general sales trends.

2) These are sales to retailers. They are not what the retailers pre-ordered but what they actually got and paid for. Diamond stopped reporting based on pre-orders back in March 2003. (There was a two month overlap of the pre-order data and the final order data in February and March of 2003.)

3) Publishers use the sales to retailers as the basis for making the decision on what to do going forward. The retailers, not the readers, are the customer of the publishers. So, the number of readers that bought the issues is not really important to the publishers. It is extremely important to the retailers who will adjust their orders accordingly at which point it does impact the publishers. In this respect, the retailers act sort of like the electoral college taking the "popular vote" from the readers (ie the actual sales to readers) and translating them into "electoral votes" (ie the orders placed through Diamond to the publishers).

Obviously point of sales information would be wonderful. This is something I've offered a few times to help make happen. So far I haven't had any takers on that. The main problem is that many comic book retailers are extremely unwilling to release any information about how their business is doing. I completely understand this and have suggested ways in which a double-blind submitting of the data could be done.

End reader information would give us a wealth of information about the end reader buying patterns and trends. While it would be nice to know how many copies of Fantastic Four #587 sold to readers (and to how many different readers and for how much), until a overwhelming business case can be presented to a threshold number of retailers justifying to them why they should contribute every month to a system to get that data, it simply isn't going to happen.

Comic book retailers seem to have little to no interest in this sort of data mining even though the long term benefits for the industry could be huge. Imagine the benefit of being able to quantify with a large degree of certainly the actual impact that raising the price of some titles from $2.99 to $3.99 have on all of the titles. With end reader sales information we could see if other titles are getting dropped by readers on a budget. Or if just some or if all of the titles in a group of titles get dropped when the family of titles gets too big. And the ability to quantify how big is too big for a family of titles.

There is a lot that could be done with end reader sales information. But all of the efforts I've made over the past couple of years have been unsuccessful.

[BobBretall]

Publishers use the sales to retailers as the basis for making the decision on what to do going forward. The retailers, not the readers, are the customer of the publishers. So, the number of readers that bought the issues is not really important to the publishers. It is extremely important to the retailers who will adjust their orders accordingly at which point it does impact the publishers. In this respect, the retailers act sort of like the electoral college taking the "popular vote" from the readers (ie the actual sales to readers) and translating them into "electoral votes" (ie the orders placed through Diamond to the publishers).

I like this analogy.

[comicman66]

Thanks Bob and John for the replies. When I'm listening to your show, I sometimes get an opinion on something you’re talking about and try to convey it here in the forum. Thanks for giving me the time. Keep up the great work on the podcasts.