Mid-Year Report Card

It being the midway point of the year, I've taken the time to do some sales analysis as a means of determining where we're succeeding and where we could use some improvement, as well as provide a bit of a behind the scenes idea of how we judge our progress. The first area I wanted to look at is a breakdown by departments and then by category within our graphic novel/trade department. As a quick overview, here's a breakdown of our department sales as a percentage of total sales:

YTD sales dollar breakdown
Graphic Novels: 69.3%
Singles: 29.8%
Other (supplies, non-comic special orders, etc): 0.9%

April - June sales dollar breakdown
Graphic Novels: 66.2%
Singles: 32.6%
Other (supplies, non-comic special orders, etc): 1.2%

We're seeing faster growth in sales of singles than graphic novels, which corresponds with our increase in Reserve members. Our single issue sales are really where we're behind compared to our initial projections and we continue to lose money in that department although at a much slower pace than in our first three months. Still, it's an area that needs improvement as well as a more detailed analysis.

We currently divide out graphic novels into 7 sections: Adventure, All Ages, Fiction, Manga, Mystery, Non-Fiction and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Sales for these categories break down as follows (based on percentage of total graphic novel sales):

YTD sales dollar breakdown (percentage of unit sales in parenthesis)
Adventure: 35.8% (32.9%)
Fiction: 21.0% (21.5%)
Sci-Fi/Fantasy: 15.5% (13.7%)
Mystery: 12.9% (11.4%)
Manga: 6.7% (11.4%)
Non-Fiction: 4.8% (4.3%)
All Ages: 3.3% (4.8%)

April - June sales dollar breakdown (percentage of unit sales in parenthesis)
Adventure: 35.9% (31.5%)
Fiction: 19.2% (19.3%)
Sci-Fi/Fantasy: 16.6% (15.2%)
Mystery: 13.3% (11.6%)
Manga: 7.3% (13.5%)
Non-Fiction: 4.9% (4.3%)
All Ages: 2.8% (4.6%)

There's quite a bit in those numbers that can be manipulated to say any number of things but the basic gist is that Adventure (which include the majority of our super-hero material) is a dominant category although its dominance did slip slightly over the last three months. More importantly, we've seen an upswing in Manga sales, to the point where we may have to adjust our inventory levels and merchandise layout to better take advantage of these numbers.

I'll be back tomorrow to dig into these numbers a little deeper and extrapolate on what we think they're telling us.