DC's Weeklies - Comparative Sales

It has been a while since I've done any posts about sales numbers. That's mainly because I'm not at the store. But I managed to get Craig to get me some numbers Tuesday so I could put together a post about our sales of the DC Weekly series.

We are now on the third of DC's weekly series. To be honest, I wasn't sure they could pull off one year of a weekly. However they successfully did, and then delivered a second, and are now on the third. I know when Countdown was running there was a great deal of conversation about weather or not the numbers for that series were well below the sales of the 52 series (the first DC Weekly).

Well, let's take a look at Neptune's numbers for 52, Countdown to Final Crisis and the most recent of DC's weeklies, Trinity. These numbers are for the sales of each issue listed during it's first four weeks on the rack.

52: #1 - 52 sold; #2 - 48 sold; #3 - 49 sold; #4 - 49 sold
Countdown: #51 (the first issue) - 43 sold ; #50 - 42 sold; #49 - 41 sold; #48 - 43 sold
Trinity: #1 - 44 sold; #2 - 40 sold; #3 - 35 sold; #4 - 38 sold.

Keep in mind that these are only the first month of sales for each issue - most of them continued to sell at least slightly more over the entire run of the series.

As you can see, the first month of sales for the first four issues of each series is relatively comparable. Trinity does seem to have slid a bit more that the other two after the first issue. There could be a couple reasons for that: the economy or the series. I am a bit surprised that people are dropping a series about the three main DC heroes - Batman, Superman & Wonder Woman - so quickly. But there are still people hanging on. And, if the problem is the economy there is a chance that the latter issues will still see sales - just at a slower pace. Either way, despite the public's insistence to the contrary, the DC weeklies do not appear to have seen large sales drops from series to series. At least not at our store. There has been a slight drop, but nothing too extreme.

How do these sales compare to other top selling books? Well, I didn't have Craig pull those numbers. However, I do know from experience that our very top selling comics sell about 75 issues overall, with probably about 85% of the total sold during the first 4 weeks of the issue's release. That gives us about 63 issues sold the first month and the other 12 sell during the other 8 weeks most comics are on our racks. A comic book that sells 40+ issues isn't a top seller, but it is a strong seller

In terms of what this means for the bottom line, consider that the weeklies average 40 X 4 per month = 160 sold monthly versus a top selling series that comes out once per month and sells 75 copies. So the weeklies, even if their per issue numbers are lower, still yield a higher overall series sales.