2008 Rankings: and Blood+ may just be my Rosetta Stone
Note: not the software, but the reference to a key that unlocks mysteries
Let’s start with what Blood+ is: It’s a book from Dark Horse about Vampires. Blood+ isn’t a top ten title. Or even a top 50 title: as a series, it ranks #58 on my year-end chart. Actually, I might call it a solid midlist title — it does well enough but no one is cosplaying as any of the characters.
Blood+ is notable for two reasons though; 1. it’s a 2008 release (vol. 1 came out in January and after a brief initial pause volumes have been releasing every 3 months) — and 2. (as noted here) Dark Horse gave us a unit sales number.
“The first three volumes of Blood+ manga have sold over 52,000 copies!”
Oh yeah, baby, it’s on. Let’s take the information I have, see what else we can track down, and maybe drag my arbitrary “scores” into the real world.
Let’s start not with my numbers, but with ICv2’s
Top 100 Graphic Novels Feb ’08
31. (3.42) BLOOD PLUS TP VOL 01 $10.95 DAR: 2,333
Top 100 Graphic Novels May ’08
69. (1.58) BLOOD PLUS GN VOL 02 $10.95 DAR: 1,609
Top 100 Graphic Novels Aug ’08
59. (1.63) BLOOD PLUS GN VOL 03 $10.95 DAR: 1,688
Top 300 Graphic Novels Dec ’08
59. (1.73) BLOOD PLUS GN VOL 04 $10.95 DAR: 1,617
For each volume, note that it only ranks in the ICv2 Top 100 for the month of it’s initial release, and then sales drop to the point that it no longer registers (less than 1000 copies — though the GN charts from ICv2 expanded from 100 to 300 just this past November; now they have titles ranking that sell as few as 400 or so units in a given month)
Adding up ICv2’s reported unit sales for the first three volumes, we get 5630. My own charts show a different (and somewhat more complete) sales picture
According to my estimates, the Blood+ books don’t peak online until a full month after their release, and then there is a drop-off. For Vols. 1 & 2 you can see something of a plateau after the peak-and-slide; residual demand keeps sales chugging along about 3 months before a final drop.
For the novels, you can see a much flatter graph with a single up-and-down sales bump — but interestingly, also delayed 1-2 months from the actual date of publication.
The delay might be the result of one of two things (or maybe both working in concert): Either there is a significant delay between actual sales on a site and the corresponding higher ranking reported in my sources, or people actually do shop in stores first and only buy online a week or two after they can’t find it anywhere.
Or maybe all folks don’t follow blogs with new manga release charts so there is a much slower ‘discovery’ process even for titles that they already know, like, and own.
Year End Rankings from my spreadsheet:
197. Blood+ 2 – Dark Horse, May 2008 [4377.1] ::
422. Blood+ 1 – Dark Horse, Jan 2008 [2094.1] ::
850. Blood+ 3 – Dark Horse, Aug 2008 [768.7] ::
that’s a total score for the year (all three volumes) of 7239.9. My data is for 37 of 52 weeks; setting up a quick ratio I get an adjusted score of 10175.
I estimate that online sales as a proportion of all bookstore sales is 20% (based on analysis of reported sales from Amazon, B&N, Borders, et al. in 2007)
If my estimates (both for the volumes, this series, and the market) are true, and if all assumptions are correct, and if I’m not too drunk tonight:
Aw, hell, I just won the lottery: My arbitrary scores for Blood+ vols 1, 2, & 3 seem to match up with actual unit sales within a margin of error that is scary
10175 * 5 = 50875 (as compared to 52,000 reported unit sales)
What we also see is that the direct market is about 10-15% of total sales (5630+ of 52,000 — at least for this title). Let me press my bet:
Remember the ‘pivot’ volume I listed in the Naruto Analysis? The one that hovered right at 6000 points week after week all year? (I divide by ten to go from “points” to “scores” — hence the decimals above — mostly so you folks don’t confuse the points and scores with Actual Sales)
Let’s check ICv2: what’s interesting is that each volume ranks, but once again only in the month of its release, in the case of Naruto vol 28 that’d be March when it ranked 3rd with sales of 5,427.
If ICv2’s estimates of Direct Market sales in fact represent 10% of overall sales, that’d put Naruto vol 28 at sales of 54,270 units overall. Seems low. We might suppose that for a title like Naruto, half of all sales take place the first month and another half of sales for any particular volume will take place in months and years afterward. That is an OoMA* estimate, and it actually gives Naruto credit for much longer legs than many books: More often than not, most book sales occur in the first couple of weeks; here, have some data
Stanford Graduate School of Business: Valuing Bestselling Books
Rampant TechPress: Inside the Amazon Sales Rank
Switching back to my estimates, Naruto vol 28 scores 20971.2 on my year-end chart, adjusted to 29473 for the full year (as noted above), and if online sales are in fact 20% that’d put overall sales at 147,365 units for this one title.
Do Bookstores sell Naruto at three times the rate of Diamond-dependent Local Comic Shops? Hm? I’m thinking more ‘yes’ than ‘no’ on that point.
Also of note:
–-Let’s put the book biz into perspective for most of you, big-picture-type-stuff:
Source: the June 2007 Harper’s Index*Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000.
Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000.
Number that sold more than 100,000: 483.*and I paid $26 for a subscription to verify on Harper’s website what I thought I’d read a couple months back — I might have saved the money because the same info can also be found via a Google search cited at a random blog or two. But now we all know.
[that’s a pull from 5by8, #26: So what’s the target? which also doubled as my 2006 year-in-review post.]
50,000 copies of anything is nothing to sneeze at; in fact, it’s beautiful. 10,000 copies is cause for much rejoicing at most publishers. With Naruto, Viz has a license to print money. Not just books — that damn ninja sells magazines, DVDs, merch, headbands, orange jump suits, and given the age of the fanbase and the strength of the franchise — there are probably a dozen or so college freshmen who have used the popularity of Naruto in one way or another to get laid.
Believe It!
##
This post has a lot of ifs, ands, & buts to qualify and hedge what really are merely estimates and best guesses.
3 volumes of Blood+ sold 52,000 units in 2008. That we know. Single volumes of Naruto sell at least 100,000 each. —no one is reporting that as fact, but damn, that looks about right.
And my arbitrary rankings, well…
I think I over-represent titles at the top and under-represent titles at the bottom of my list. Somewhere in the middle, though, there is a sweet spot, and I may (repeat: may) have come up with estimates that are damn close to actual sales.
Footnotes:
* OoMA = Out of My Ass — that’s a standard scientific statistical term. Well, it should be.
