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It's my FAVORITE day of the year, when Brian Hibbs posts the year-end sales from bookstores via the Bookscan chart. Now we know these numbers are significantly low, but as I always say, they present a metric.
The huge take away? Well, we all knew The Waking Dead was a juggernaut,—sales in this franchise would have made it the #3 publisher all by itself—but after that it's kids comics all the way, led by the maybe-comics of Dork Diaries, but following by Big Nate, Ninjago, Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath, Drama and so on.
An article in Forbes (which seems to be a UK-version of Forbes) takes a look at Bookscan, which claims to track 80% of physical book sales in the US.
Maybe that 80% is right for some authors, but not for me, perhaps because it doesn’t count library sales. For one of my books, the Bookscan number was only 22 percent of what it really sold. That’s a far cry from 80 percent.
The article suggests that Bookscan might be becoming obsolete.
Are anyone else's numbers looking screwed up for the week beginning Sept. 12? Like sales falling 95% for some books?
Wherein I Expose Myself as a Bit of a Numbers Nerd
Okay, so a lot of the hoopla and hysteria has died down about Amazon introducing limited Bookscan data to authors. Now that the surprise has worn off and those that were liable to be shocked and dazed have recovered, let’s talk about just how useful a tool they can be. Especially now that we’ve talked at length about the very many different ways success can be measured and achieved, these numbers shouldn’t hold terror for you.
Because yes, I always come down firmly on the side of the more information the better and knowledge is power and any permutation of such sentiments.
Plus, isn’t it better to know if the numbers aren’t great early rather than later? Because if you find out early enough, at least you can do something if you want to. [Note: This is a luxury that applies mostly to children’s and YA books. As I understand it adult books have a much shorter window to ‘make good’ and by the time you realize it’s not happening, it may be too late to do much about it. Kids books, by virtue of their sales channels and distribution patterns, usually have six to twelve months, often longer.]
Important Caveat: You are only allowed to look at and play with your sales numbers if you can be professional about it and not panic and whine to your agent or editor. If numbers make you hyperventilate or break out in welts, best to come back next week. ☺ Also? Don’t engage in any of the following activities while you are in an active, creating phase. Save it for a fallow or dormant time.
So the first thing to do is begin recording your weekly sales numbers (by book) on a spreadsheet of some sort—either computer based or plain old paper. The thing is, four weeks of data is pretty much meaningless. It is putting that data in context where we can see patterns and trends and directions. So record your weekly sales. Not only are you compiling important information, but it is also a great metaphor/microcosm for the cyclical, up and down nature of publishing that you can see with your own eyes. Your book might spike one week, then be on a downward trend for the next two, then spike back up in the fourth week.
If you have more than four books out, as I do, and you only see three titles listed in the graph then a nebulous “other” listing, you CAN find out your sales numbers by individual title. Up at the very top left corner of the screen where it says All Books, there is a little orange arrow. Click on that to reveal each individual title’s numbers. (I actually just found this out last week.)
One reason it can be so helpful to see this information real time is that, if you’re lucky, you might be able to detect a cause and effect with your marketing efforts. After a series of Skype visits, or a blog tour, or school visits you may be able to see your numbers move, which will be a good indicator of which type of activities have an impact on your sales. However, it is also important to remember that sometimes the impact a particular activity has may not show for a while, so only use this in a reinforcement type capacity—not as a means of eliminating stuff.
See if you can get your agent to finagle some sort of performance expectation from your publisher or editor so you’ll have a benchmark you know you’re shooting for. Although a good rule of thumb is the goal of earning out your advance within the first 12-18 month
I'm obsessed with numbers. Obsessed. I used to call this automated toll-free number Ingram had that reported how many of your books had shipped. When they discontinued the number, I was left with Amazon, which still represents such a tiny fraction of the books sold.
Right now, I'm lucky. One of my publishers does quarterly royalty statements (practically unheard of) and one of my editors has sent me several notes to let me know how many copies of one book have shipped to date.
But that's shipped, not sold.
And then there's Bookscan, which supposedly tracks 75% of sales (no Wal-Mart, though, and I don't think any library sales). But these are real sales, not books shipped to bookstores (which can and returned to the publisher for credit). I even emailed Bookscan to ask about purchasing the right to see one ISBN, which supposedly cost $85. They never replied.
Amazon's Author Central now allows authors to see their own Nielsen Bookscan weekly data for the last 4 weeks. For free!
You can read the LA Times article here.. I'm just glad it's only updating weekly. Because that Ingram number was like crack cocaine.
By: Kathy Temean,
on 10/27/2010
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Since so many of you have signed book contracts or seeing the your book hit the shelves, I thought you might be interested in this post that Alan Rinzler had on his blog. This is important information to know about your sales.
Here’s Alan (make sure you link over at the bottom – there’s more):
An author friend of mine couldn’t figure out why he was having so much trouble selling his new book. He had a respectable list of published books to his name, a regular schedule of speeches and workshops, and a solid platform in print and broadcast media.
So on a hunch, I looked him up on Nielsen BookScan, an industry service for publishers that reports actual book sales by ISBN number at retailers across the country.
There was the answer in black and white. The sales figures for his last book were dismal.
He was shocked at the news, certain that the numbers were wrong. In fact, he was only dimly aware of BookScan and didn’t really understand what it was or how it worked.
Big mistake.
BookScan numbers are like an author’s credit rating
All book publishers (and some savvy authors) subscribe to Nielsen BookScan. The very first thing an acquisitions editor does is check a published author’s Nielsen numbers, when considering a new submission.
Nielsen BookScan tells the naked truth about how many copies a book sells. It produces weekly tallies via electronic links to thousands of cash registers across the country. This is no guess or anecdotal report. It’s all ka-ching, straight from the till.
The numbers may as well be carved in stone.
“We only report what we receive from cash registers, and we never change our numbers,” said Jim King, the go-to guy for book publishers at Nielsen in a phone interview at the company’s White Plains, NY offices.
“The book may have sold additional copies, but not through our reporting outlets. An author’s book might have sold at non-reporting retailers like Wal-Mart or book clubs, but we have no way of including that. So there’s no way anyone can request us to change an ISBN report.”
Recent BookScan results may determine whether a book is acquired
The most recent Nielsen numbers will therefore have a powerful impact on whether or not a book is acquired in the first place, since publishers take these numbers as indications of the new book’s potential success.
Poor recent numbers may put a damper on a publisher’s enthusiasm to sign up your major new opus. I’ve known authors with a long track record of success slip into a marginal status with a single recent sales failure.
Brutal but true.
How Nielsen numbers impact bookseller orders
Even if a book is ultimately appealing, recent low Nielsen numbers will impact the all-important realistic projections for the new book’s potential sales.
This can affect not only the advance, since most publishers predicate the amount paid on signing on projected first year sales — but also the first printing. That’s because sales reps know that the major accounts will also consult Nielsen as well as their own internal records to determine how many they’ll order of the new title.
In some case, they may actually pass. That’s right, book buyers may skip ordering any copies at all if the author’s last book had unimpressive performance numbers.
How Nielsen collects sales data
Nielsen says that they cover about 75 percent of retail book sales in the United States. In a typical week, they track sales of more than 300,000 titles by their ISBN numbers, at nearly 13,000 retail accounts in the United States, including Amazon, the n
STATUS: I’m sure I don’t have to say that yesterday was a little hectic.
What’s playing on the XM or iPod right now? SIMPLE DAY by One Eskimo
As an agency, we have a subscription to Bookscan and every Wednesday, we send out a sales reports in Excel spreadsheets to each of our clients for their published titles. (FYI--Nielsen is a subscription service that captures point-of-sales information from certain retail outlets.)
This sounds great. Real sales numbers! Except not every retailer reports to Bookscan. Some key accounts like Costco do report but other key accounts like Walmart do not.
Which means that Bookscan is not a whole picture of how a title is doing.
So over the years, I’ve created our own system of calculating how accurate it is by comparing the royalty statement sales to the Bookscan number sales and capturing the percentage difference.
For some genres, it can be off by 50 or 60%. That’s a lot. The numbers for literary fiction tend to be a bit more on target as Bookscan seems to capture about 70% of sales for this segment.
Why is this important? Well, if you are a midlist author looking to move houses, well, guess what numbers the editors are looking at in order to base a decision of whether they want to offer for you or not? You guessed it. Bookscan.
And if that number is only capturing 50% of the sales… I have to firmly argue the actual sales numbers and sometimes, that doesn’t matter. The house will often make a decision based solely on those Bookscan numbers. Hugely frustrating as you can imagine.
By the way, Bookscan does not currently capture digital point-of-sales. Yeah, that’s going to need to change as more and more sales are done digitally in the upcoming years. And yet another problem with Publishers deciding that Bookscan is a reliable reflection of sales…
A comment appeared on my post about self-published works that I felt warranted its own post.
Question: Where do the agents and publishers get the sales numbers for a self-published book? The author? Does the author provide financials as proof? Or is there another way to know for sure how many copies have been sold (not just printed)?
Publishers and agents will get this information from Bookscan, and while we all know by now that Bookscan isn’t perfect, and you can read more in my previous post on the subject, we also know that it’s the go-to for publishing professionals when it comes to numbers.
And this is the struggle with Bookscan. If you’ve gotten even a few stores to carry your books it can tweak your numbers significantly and, if you’re getting the kinds of numbers most publishers and agents are looking for, it should appear somewhere on Bookscan.
Jessica
Back in June agent Andrew Zack wrote a series of posts on Bookscan and since then I’ve received a number of questions from authors asking my thoughts on Bookscan and my recommendations for how authors can track Bookscan numbers or their numbers in general.
For those not familiar with Bookscan, let me explain briefly that Bookscan is the book version of the Nielson TV rating system. It tracks and monitors sales of books in various outlets. However, like any mass tracking system it’s not perfect. Bookscan does not track every sale in every single outlet and certainly there are some major stores missing from the list, most notably Walmart.
Bookscan should not and typically is not taken into account if you are going back to contract with your current publisher (they have their own, more accurate, numbers to look at) or if you are a debut author. However, where Bookscan most predominantly comes into play is for authors looking to change houses or those who might have self-published and are now looking to find a publisher for that self-published title or the next book. Publishers are not going to be able to call up a competing house and say, “Hey, we’re looking to steal your author, care to share the numbers?” and because of that they have to go to the next most reliable source, Bookscan. This helps give them a feel for what kind of orders they can expect from bookstores. And yes, they do realize that Bookscan isn’t complete, but, especially for books that they don’t expect outlets like Walmart to take, it can help make a determination as to expectations.
So how does this impact you as an author and do you need to track your Bookscan numbers? Certainly it’s helpful to have as much information as you can about yourself and how you’re perceived, but Bookscan is really expensive and I do not think the cost is worth it for an individual author, especially since it’s not a complete accounting. The very best place to go to learn how well your book is doing and what kind of numbers you’re getting is your publisher. Call your editor, or have your agent call your editor, to find out what sales look like. However, if you still, even out of curiosity, really want to know how you look on Bookscan (and it can’t hurt unless you let it), organizations like RWA have considerably cheaper Bookscan subscription fees; keep in mind, however, that the RWA subscription only tracks the top 100 romances and therefore wouldn’t be helpful if you’re writing in any other genre.
Here are my thoughts: if you can get a less costly subscription to Bookscan that’s useful for you, like through RWA, do so. It’s worth it just to see how your book and others are tracking. It’s also helpful for you to be able to see trends and keep track of the market. However, the really important numbers are those that are coming through on your royalty statement. Those are the numbers that matter and, in the end, that stand out to everyone as the ones to watch. If you are tracking Bookscan I would say do so with the same attitude you track your ratings on Amazon or B&N.com. They are a sign of how well your book is doing, but not the whole picture.
Jessica
By: Rebecca,
on 6/9/2008
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By Evan Schnittman
[A Full Disclosure Note From Evan] Let’s be clear from the start: Neither Amazon nor Sony have told me anything. I get nada, zilch, bupkis when I ask even the most circumspect questions about their respective device sales. If it has to do with Kindle or Reader, I get the standard “go away” line. I have not manipulated sales data, be it OUP’s or any other publisher. I have not analyzed Amazon or Sony ebook sales statistics or rankings. I have not found any secret documents. I have not broken into the vault, I have not cracked the code, I have not had prophetic dreams - well, not about any e-ink devices anyway…
What I do have is a subscription to DIGITIMES that has led me to some pretty outlandish and, I think, substantiated conclusions about Kindle and Sony Reader sales figures. Before you dismiss me as loopy check out the evidence…
When the Kindle first launched there was plenty of predictions about how it and its predecessor the Sony Reader would sell. Over time the chatter died down, halted partly by the Kindle going out of stock. At the end of April, the chatter returned and hit full volume after last week’s Book Expo America in Los Angeles. The catalyst was Jeff Bezos’ speech, which let out some tantalizing, yet cryptic information on ebook sales volume at the Kindle store. The chatter, as reported in the NY Times, has publishers and others speculating that Amazon has sold somewhere between 10,000 - 50,000 Kindles.
I think all the speculations are completely wrong. By my calculations, combined sales of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader will be 1,000,000 units in 2008. This estimate is based on solid data.
The Evidence
Amazon and Sony both use the 6-inch electrophoretic display (EPD), also known as an e-ink screen. Both companies buy their EPD’s from Prime View International (PVI) of Taiwan. DIGITIMES, a daily news service covering the Taiwanese IT market, reported on April 18th, in a story entitled PVI EDP shipments to grow sharply in 2008, that PVI expects EPD module shipments to reach 120,000 units PER MONTH in the second half of 2008. It further explains that the unit price of the screens are $60-$70 per unit and that the current volume has been 60-80,000 units PER MONTH.
Also intriguing is the article’s claim that 60% of the EPD’s go to Amazon and 40% go to Sony. This is an important factor as it implies that there is a market beyond Kindle – a very, very strong market. Taking the figures at face value, Sony was selling (or at least manufacturing) an average of 28,000 readers per month (I took 70,000 units as the average sold per month and then 40% of that). Using this monthly rate, the annual sales of the Sony Reader are at nearly 350,000 units. Using the same formula, Amazon is ordering an average of 42,000 units per month, which will add up to over 500,000 units sold this year.
With production ramping up to 120,000 units a month these numbers will look much better - to the tune of a combined 1.4 million units over 12 months! Even with the Kindle out of stock for a big chunk of the first and second quarter, combined sales of these two e-ink devices in 2008 will most likely top 1 million. If a million devices are out on the street looking to feed, and we know they primarily eat one kind of food, ebooks, then what must this mean for the ebook sales?
Jeff Bezos said last week that ebook sales in the Kindle store had hit 6% of book unit sales. What this means is that of the 125,000 titles available in the Kindle store, the sales of ebooks represented 6% of the sales of those same 125,000 titles in print formats. Another interesting thing that Bezos said was that Kindle buyers purchase at a rate of 2.5 times more than print book buyers… food for thought when thinking through your ebook strategy.
One can draw some ebook sales conclusions from this information. For example, the number 2 seller at the Kindle store is The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. According to Bookscan, in 4 weeks this book has sold 784,158 units. For the sake of argument, lets ascribe 75,000 units (10% of total sales, a reasonable guess) to Amazon. If Kindle sales were 6%, then Amazon would have already sold 4,500 ebooks. That’s 4,500 people with Kindle’s buying a single title in 4 weeks!
While its clearly amazing that in one month an ebook can sell 4,500 units it is not the best way to calculate the ebook sales impact of Kindle and Reader. A better way to approach this is through good old-fashioned guess-timation. Taking stock of my own experience and the experiences of others I know, I found that ebook buying on either the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle ranges from 5 ebooks to over 100 ebooks. Assuming that anyone who buys an e-ink ebook reader is doing so to read ebooks, lets assume that 10 ebooks a year is a reasonable purchase estimate. Using this logic, we should see 10 million ebooks purchased for these two devices in 2008.
The IDPF estimates that in 2007 ebook sales income was $31,800,000 with the caveat that the actual retail income could be as much as double due to retailer discounts, so lets assume that the sales actually totaled $60,000,000. If we use an average retail price of $12 per ebook sold, and if consumers will buy 10 ebooks a year, then they will spend $120 on average, per device. That would lead us to $120,000,000 in ebook sales for the Kindle and the Reader in 2008, double all ebook sales in 2007. (For those of you who cannot swallow the idea of 10 books purchased per device – cut it in half. The result is $60,000,000 in ebook sales – as much as last year!)
Success in technology, like everything else, leads to more success. It’s not uncommon to see five-fold growth the year following a successful technology product launch. Think iPod, think Wii, think Blackberry. Whole micro-economies emerge around products that range from accelerated content creation, and all sorts of aftermarket products and services. Versions 2.0 and beyond create better and better devices. The better the devices, the more accessories, the more content there is, and soon a whole world of business opportunity is rolling downhill picking up speed.
With this in mind, I can easily imagine the success of Kindle and Reader dramatically expanding next year and growing by a factor of five. If that happens, then the formula above leads to a completely new ebook economy. Five million devices would mean ebook sales of $1,200,000,000, which, by my estimation, is 1.3% of the current global book market of $90,000,000,000.
This reminds me of a comment I heard from a music industry executive at a conference a couple of years ago. “One day there was the iPod and iTunes. The next day 20% of our business was digital. The day after that more than 50% of our revenues came from digital music. Yeah, we believe in digital music now.”
I personally don’t see publishing becoming a 50% digital business as books and cd’s are completely different animals. But I sure can see that the 3% - 4% I once predicted isn’t such a crazy notion any more. And yes, I believe in ebooks.
Evan Schnittman is OUP’s Vice President of Business Development and Rights for the Academic and USA Divisions. His career in publishing spans nearly 20 years and includes positions as varied as Executive Vice President at The Princeton Review and Professor at New York University’s Center for Publishing. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.
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As a children’s writing instructor and a writing coach, I help writers set their writing and publishing goals at the start of each new year.
In the next few days, I’d like to share a few tips for setting your writing and publishing goals for 2008.
Here’s today’s tip:
When setting your goal(s), make sure each goal is something you have control over.
Many writers set goals like: I want to have three published stories in Highlights magazine by the end of this year.
That may sound like a great goal. But actually, the writer really has no control over whether or not three of his/her stories will be accepted and published in Highlights or any other magazine.
So, if the person setting this goal isn’t able to make this happen, he/she feels like a failure, when actually, his/her stories may have been rejected by Highlights (or any other magazine) for a variety of reasons that the writer has no control over.
A much better goal would be this: I plan to SUBMIT three stories to Highlights magazine this year.
See why that’s a much better goal?
You DO have control over this.
You CAN make this happen.
You CAN write and submit 3 stories to Highlights (or any other magazine) this year.
And, at the end of the year, you will have met your goal – whether or not the stories were accepted for publication.
Eventually your stories will be accepted for publication in the magazines you are submitting them to if:
1) you have learned what it takes to write a good story for kids,
2) you’ve constantly practiced writing and improving your work, and
3) you’ve done your market research so you are actually sending your stories to appropriate markets (by that I mean, the magazines that are right for the types of stories you are writing).
Look at your goals today.
Do you have control over whether or not you reach these goals?
If not, rethink your goals.
Create goals that are not dependent on outside forces, things you really have no control over.
Then do whatever it takes to achieve those goals this year!
Happy writing!
Suzanne Lieurance
The Working Writer’s Coach
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For anyone with kids this is totally not a surprise. I am lucky enough that my local comics store has a nice selection of kids’ comics. Most of them, however, I’d never even let my kid inside. And they don’t even carry the Ninjago or Dragonbreath comics (too bad, their loss). When is the comics world going to pay attention to this demographic? Never mind, they don’t need to. They’re doing just fine without Marvel and DC.
I wouldn’t say the Bookscan numbers significantly low, just significantly wrong. They may be “almost right” in some cases, “80% right” in other cases (as PW claims), “abysmally low” in other cases, and “dead-on correct” in the rest.
Also, great news on the kids’ comics best-sellers! This is a hopeful sign that bookstores are taking more chances with comics in general, specifically children’s which is a safer risk across all publishing categories. It may surprise many, but the biggest holdout in kids’ comics at retail isn’t comics stores, but indie bookstores.
I love, love, love Ursula Vernon. Seriously, my walls are covered in her prints. The difficulty of getting Dragonbreath into UK book stores is one of the banes of my life!
I wrote a lengthy article on this back in… October I think on my own site, highlighting the fact that Kids Comics were the second biggest genre grower across UK book stores – up 86% year on year. Which is MASSIVE, particularly given the downwards trend of general fiction (not including Graphic Novels which is still on an upturn as well).
In my own store I ran a kids comics bay for a few months and it accounted for 5-10% of all kids sales every month that it was in existence. Yet sure enough as soon as I took my eye off it, it got packed away to make way for kids annuals that sell peanuts. Sigh.
A quick search on Diamond’s retailer site shows that DRAGONBREATH is something they’ve never offered. Which would be why most comic shops don’t have the book: like The Beat, they’ve never heard of it until now.
so Heidi likes Bookscan when it backs up her POV, and derides it when it doesn’t.
this aversion to consistent use of fact is duly noted…
Dragonbreath is marketed as fiction, not comics. If you’ve never seen the books, each volume is mostly illustrated prose text with maybe 30% of the book in comic book format pages interspersed throughout. The series is very popular in my school, right along with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which is also cataloged as fiction.
It was observed to me by a third party that for a good part of 2012 Barnes & Noble was not stocking the “top 100″ DC Comics, which I entirely forgot about in my BookScan 2012 report.
There are published reports that say that this ended at the end of June 2012, but there’s also reports from everyone’s favorite muckraker, Rich Johnston, that some/much of the books were returning to some B&N locations before 2011 even ended.
What does this actually do to the charts? I have no real idea. Typically 4th quarter is the strongest sales quarter, so, in theory, this should have impacted DC’s 2011 numbers much stronger than 2012, but even that’s uncertain — how much demand was simply delayed until the books returned to stock, how much was shunted over to Amazon or indy book stores? How much unmet demand yielded no sale for DC? I have no frickin’ idea, but at the very least it should have been NOTED in the column, and that’s a lousy mistake for me to have made.
There was just 12k difference (701k vs 689k) in sales between DC and Image this year, so it’s possible, mayyybe even likely that DC actually “would have” been the #1 western publisher, but I can only analyze the numbers that are there, rather than the ones that aren’t. Still…. asterisk that analysis, I think, to be safe.
Thanks!
-B
From Heidi: “kids’ comics are the biggest growth area for the medium right now, and this strong new generation of comics readers is a wave the medium should be able to surf successfully for years to come.”
To Heidi’s point here, I’m not at all convinced this inherently parses.
Historically, what happens is that “kid” readers ENTIRELY LEAVE the hobby at (roughly) the onset of puberty, to POTENTIALLY “come back” five-ish years later once they reach late HS/early college period, often driven by “nostalgia” for what they liked as kids.
The relative power of Superhero comics was that they (once!) worked on a level appealing to children, and on a DIFFERENT level appealing to college kids — I’m not necessarily convinced that kids reading DORK DIARIES and DRAGONBREATH and BIG NATE today has a natural and native “return path”.
The more important thing, to me, is to make sure that we have an INCREDIBLY STRONG “tween” list (The DRAMA / Rick Riordan kind of path) so that kid readers never “break the habit” to begin with — there’s not enough super-strong titles for this cohort yet, IMO, and no historical indications that it will actually WORK in retaining audiences as their bodies and minds shift into adulthood.
-B
(in other words: kids comics are pretty much easy, low-hanging fruit. One truth that I have found is kids pretty don’t care WHAT comics they read, they naturally and natively just like comics, whatever they are, good, bad, or in the middle)
(That’s usually because someone else is paying for it! *grin*)
-B
I never gave up comics, and neither have my two sons, nor my daughter-in-law. My older son started reading comics as a kid, transitioned to manga in middle school, and still reads manga (and the occasional superhero comic) – he read manga all through high school. My younger son is not a real manga fan – he reads through all of the DC comics he can get his hands on, plus The Walking Dead, and whatever else he finds in the house (which is a LOT – I’m a comics reviewer); he’s now a high school senior, and comics are his preferred reading material. My daughter-in-law started reading manga in high school and never stopped.
Come to think of it, the local public library sees a lot of young people who still love manga – they started in middle school and are still reading it in high school. And a lot of them are creating their own art. I think Mr. Hibbs may not be quite right in his assertion that most teens drop comics.
I’ll keep tabs on my students and see if those who are picking up comics in my school library as 1st and 2nd graders will continue into middle school. I know that some of my current 8th graders started reading comics in 3rd grade and still like them. Since they’re not reading superhero comics, but lots of indie kid comics, I wonder if that will keep them reading into their teens and beyond.
I think Brian is right about that historical trend of “give up and come back for nostalgia” trend when looking at superhero comics reading habits. Of course, there’s no real need, content-wise for any tween to leave superhero comics when they hit 5th grade, it just kind of happens that way. (Or at least it seems to.)
But kids who are exposed to the comics MEDIUM and love it (as they almost always will, as Brian points out) really truly have no reason to stop at any point in their reading development and I’m not sure they do. When I “grew out” of superheroes myself (ha!) before coming back to it in college, I had plenty of Vertigo, Fantagraphics, and other books to keep me enthralled through high school. Nowadays kids have even more non-superhero options than I did.
And they don’t have to be specifically tween comics. A precocious 11-year-old reader is already reading adult books anyway and if they’re not, there are still plenty of more junior comics to read.
[...] analyst John Jackson Miller has taken the BookScan numbers posted by Brian Hibbs, and added them with the Diamond year-end sales charts, and then triangulated [...]
“The more important thing, to me, is to make sure that we have an INCREDIBLY STRONG “tween” list (The DRAMA / Rick Riordan kind of path) so that kid readers never “break the habit” to begin with — ”
Brian is right that there needs to be more books for each age range and demographic. Jumping from Tiny Titans to Walking Dead with little in between is going to be a tricky transition! But the teenagers (with their darn apathy and contradictory stance on anything people tell them) have always been tricky to market too.
To be clear(er?), I think that the “natural attrition” that happens isn’t connected whatsoever to superhero comics — it’s just that superhero comics (USED TO!) have a much clearer “return path” for post-adolescent readers. There wasn’t the same natural thing for Archie and Harvey readers
But SH comics haven’t been appropriate for children in a really long time, so that’s the old paradigm. Let’s not fixate on it too much “superheroes” versus “not superheroes” — that’s not especially fruitful, IMO.
Rather, when one discovers sex, discovers dating and fashion and cars and whatever other thing it is that consumes adolescent brains, the tendency is to “leave childish things behind”. Comics, historically, in America, were seen as childish, though that has certainly been changing, culturally, over the last decade. Enough so as for there to be a natural, inviolate path like Heidi suggests? I’m not convinced of that… yet.
I think we’d need another 10-20 years of history to tell us whether that is true or not — certainly the post-adolescent Manga readers have not *appeared* to have started returning as of yet, right? (Because it would sure seem to me that a big big chunk of the collapse of the US Manga market stemmed from “aging-out” readers…..)
-B
Obviously, I disagree with Brian, although it comes down to proving a negative. We already know what happens when you completely abandon the kids market — the 90s. Crash and burn. The ONLY thing that kept Marvel and DC’s characters current for kids was the cartoons — DC in particular should kneel down and thank Bruce Timm and Paul Dini every day as those cartoons kept the DC characters alive for younger generations.
Luckily, the 90s also saw the rise of excellent comics for adults — from Chris Ware to Vertigo to Hellboy. So when the kids who didn’t read comics got older the adventurous ones had something to read and buy.
Starting in the 00s we saw the rise of the bookstore market with manga drawing in tweens on up, and now a very healthy, growing market for kids comics. Although manga readers have aged out, the core manga titles — Naruto, Death Note, etc, still are strong sellers.
I remember many 90s retailers — and I’m pretty sure Brian was among them — telling me they didn’t want kids in their stores. I think this was a natural fear that kids would see adult content and the New Wertham would arise. Myself, and a few others, thought this was a very dangerous precedent, and the American comics industry as we know it came pretty close to dying out.
I think we have a pretty good model of how comics readers might have “aged up” by looking at the 80s, when there were 11,000 comics shops and Boris The Bear sold 50,000 copies. Children’s comics flourished in the 60s and 70s with the newsstands – Archies, Gold Key, Harveys. As that market died out — the legendary 7-11s of yore — readers aged up into Cerebus and Love and Rockets — all of which sold what Green Lantern does now. It was a smaller audience than read the newsstand comics true, but the problems of distribution, finding a store and mancave like stores was still there.
I don’t mean to sound like everything is solved, but we have by far the strongest range of material, most dedicated, mature creators and tenacious, savvy retailers that we’ve had since I ‘ve been around. Not every kid reading Big Nate is going to read Captain Marvel or The Voyeurs. But they’re not going to say “What’s a comic book?” either. That’s bound to be a plus.
Obviously, I disagree with Brian, although it comes down to proving a negative. We already know what happens when you completely abandon the kids market — the 90s. Crash and burn. The ONLY thing that kept Marvel and DC’s characters current for kids was the cartoons — DC in particular should kneel down and thank Bruce Timm and Paul Dini every day as those cartoons kept the DC characters alive for younger generations.
Luckily, the 90s also saw the rise of excellent comics for adults — from Chris Ware to Vertigo to Hellboy. So when the kids who didn’t read comics got older the adventurous ones had something to read and buy.
Starting in the 00s we saw the rise of the bookstore market with manga drawing in tweens on up, and now a very healthy, growing market for kids comics. Although manga readers have aged out, the core manga titles — Naruto, Death Note, etc, still are strong sellers.
I remember many 90s retailers — and I’m pretty sure Brian was among them — telling me they didn’t want kids in their stores. I think this was a natural fear that kids would see adult content and the New Wertham would arise. Myself, and a few others, thought this was a very dangerous precedent, and the American comics industry as we know it came pretty close to dying out.
I think we have a pretty good model of how comics readers might have “aged up” by looking at the 80s, when there were 11,000 comics shops and Boris The Bear sold 50,000 copies. Children’s comics flourished in the 60s and 70s with the newsstands – Archies, Gold Key, Harveys. As that market died out — the legendary 7-11s of yore — readers aged up into Cerebus and Love and Rockets — all of which sold what Green Lantern does now. It was a smaller audience than read the newsstand comics true, but the problems of distribution, finding a store and mancave like stores was still there.
I don’t mean to sound like everything is solved, but we have by far the strongest range of material, most dedicated, mature creators and tenacious, savvy retailers that we’ve had since I ‘ve been around. Not every kid reading Big Nate is going to read Captain Marvel or The Voyeurs. But their not going to say “What’s a comic book?” either. That’s bound to be a plus.