There is a question on my retailer message board about how the sell through on the Before Watchmen books have been. I have had some people here concerned that it is not selling because I have so many left on the shelf.
Because of these 2 things, I decided to look at the numbers for myself. The books are selling fabulously as far as I am concerned.
The reason I have so many on the shelf is that DC offered us a consignment deal on them. If we exceeded our order of Green Lantern #6, we could order and additional 25% and we could return the unsold copies. This was really a great way to handle this, because, in all reality, this was a very hard number to try to come up with. Ordering these books was really a total guess. Giving us some wiggle room to have extras on the shelf made it much easier.
So here are my sell through percentages.
Minutemen #1 105% (dipped into the consignment copies already)
#2 88%
Silk Spectre #1 84%
#2 69%
Comedian #1 88%
#2 77%
Nite Owl #1 83%
#2 85%
Ozymandias #1 81%
#2 79%
Rorschach #1 72% (1 week)
These are really great numbers. By contrast AvX #10 is at 71%. Green Lantern #12 is at 73%. So books that I had hard sales data aren’t selling quite what I expected and total guesses are doing great.
To give you an idea just how they are selling, in my top sellers for August, Nite Owl #2, Rorschach #1 and Ozymandias #2 are #6, 7 & 8. Behind Batman #12, AvX #9 & #10, Detective #12 and Batman & Robin #12.