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Worldwide Comic Pre-Orders vs. U.S. Sales

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 6:42 am
by JohnMayo
ICv2 has an intersting article up about the differences in the Diamond estimates they calculate and the worldwide preorders provided by Image Comics for the 2013-03-15 releases:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/25506.html:
Image Comics provided us with worldwide (including Diamond UK) pre-order numbers for 15 March releases, so we could compare them to the ICv2 estimates for sales from U.S. Diamond locations in March, drawn from our over-all estimates of Diamond U.S. sales to comic stores (see "Top 300 Comics Actual--March 2013").  So the differences between the numbers reflect two things:  the pre-order numbers include Diamond UK numbers, and the ICv2 estimates do not; and the ICv2 numbers include reorders, but the pre-orders do not.  One other key difference on East of West #1 is that the pre-order numbers include over-ship numbers; the ICv2 numbers include a Diamond reserve for returns.

Typically, we've seen the Diamond UK numbers amount to about 10% of the total Diamond sales in the past, but that percentage can vary wildly depending on the title.
The Diamond data equates to as low as 82% for East of West #1 (with Diamond reducing the numbers for potential return of the overshipped copies) to as high as 99.62% on Peter Panzerfaust #10 with only 42 additional copies in the Image worldwide data. The average is 93.03% which is a little high than I would have expected.

As I've always stated, the Diamond data isn't the complete picture but it is the overwhelming majority and represents the core comic book reading audience.

Re: Worldwide Comic Pre-Orders vs. U.S. Sales

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 8:56 am
by simonuk
Being from the UK I presumed automatically; of course the overseas amount makes up such a small percentage because 'brick-and-mortar' stores are much few-and-further between and going to a physical non-comic book store and buying a comic is much less common. It was then when searching on diamond's site for the first time I found that their numbers include internet stores etc, would this include all official ebay stores and casual ebay individual sellers? I have no idea if these sellers source their comics the same way having never attempted to sell comics.

As a kid I was bought Roy of the Rovers and TMNT from a local cornershop out of a choice of quite a few US titles, but now outside of a few Simpsons and Barbie comics aimed at a younger market you'd find nothing in a local newsagent, and a physical comic book store would be much further away, and a smaller presence than in the States. For quite a while the internet store, or seller on ebay, I would think has been the common route for buying comics in the UK and therefore the extent to which these sellers are reflected in numbers would play a great part in the degree to which overseas sales as a whole are reflected.

Of course this is a purely personal anecdotal piece of evidence and it may be other UK buyers are able to contradict this.