Something that I’m genuinely curious about from the most recent Diamond sales charts: What happened to Fear Itself: The Fearless? As a bi-weekly book, there are two issues in the new chart, but while #2 shows almost no drop-off in orders from the debut (57,794 estimated orders, according to ICv2, against #1′s 59,464 estimate), #3 – solicited at the same time as #2 – was ordered significantly lower (36,044 orders according to ICv2 estimates; that’s just 62% of #2′s orders). Why? Did retailers assume that 38% of the audience was going to jump off the book between #2 and #3 in the same month? Was Fearless #2 either overshipped, a la Point One, or part of some order-matching scheme in order for retailers to earn a variant edition or something similar? It’s such a large drop for seemingly no reason otherwise.
I remember reading someone – Dan Slott, I think, but I could be wrong – advance the theory once that books that ship more than once every month traditionally have heavier orders for the first issue of that month, which might account for some drop off, but 21,000 orders? That seems a bit much of a drop, surely.
Seriously, if retailers out there can help with this, I’d love to know if this is an entirely random steep drop, or if there’s something that helps explain it.
December 13th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
I noticed that too!
Hope someone can answer.
December 13th, 2011 at 1:12 pm
I can only speak for my shop obviously, but my order numbers have been pretty consistent. I do tend to order #1′s and #2′s at slightly higher numbers on the off chance that people will pick it up, but once we get to issue #3 I only exceed my subscriber numbers by 1 or 2 depending on the series and how many people are likely to wander in and pick up a copy. With this book I was only ordering 1 extra copy from the beginning because of the diminishing interest I was seeing in Fear Itself.
December 13th, 2011 at 1:52 pm
My guess is it has something to do w/ the backlash from Fear Itself? Fans feeling it was a dud event and that the changed from it have already been undercut?
December 13th, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Diamond offers a service called Final Order Cutoff that allows customers to adjust their orders for books a few weeks before the book comes out. Since the FOC is usually done two weeks in advance, retailers ordered their number ones, but issue #1 wasn’t out (or came out the same day, I can’t remember which) as the FOC for issue #2, so we didn’t have any idea yet how well #1 would sell. So, at least at our store, we didn’t change our orders that much. However, by the time #3 was available for FOC, we had seen that Fearless was kind of a dud so we slashed orders accordingly.