“Rankings reflect sales of graphic novels…at many thousands of venues where a wide range of books are sold nationwide. These include hundreds of independent book retailers (statistically weighted to represent all such outlets); national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; university, gift, supermarket, discount department stores and newsstands. In addition, these rankings also include unit sales reported by retailers nationwide that specialize in graphic novels and comic books.”

Though the language can be parsed several ways, that last part–”unit sales reported by retailers nationwide that specialize in graphic novels and comic books”–certainly implies that they are getting data on retailers’ sales, not relying on the wholesaler’s sell-in figures.

Whether they’re getting that data from arrangements with idividual comics retialers, or through an arrangment with some other entity that aggregates individual comics retailers’ sell-through data, we, of course can’t tell.

Also, at a nitpick, I’m not sure that the New York Times uses Bookscan numbers (at least not exclusively) to generate their bestseller list. The NYT Bestseller list long precedes Bookscan after all, so they must have had some mechanism for getting book sales data long before Bookscan came on the scene. They may still be using much of the same non-Bookscan intrastructure they’d built previously. Or maybe not, but it’s at least a possibility.

Sales through the DM are non-returnable sales. Therefor it doesn’t matter what the sell through is, the publishers got their money. So those sales count. Plus with the top books in the DM, you can maybe assume that most stores didn’t gamble a whole lot and for the majority of those shipped it was a quick sell through?

Then they add on Bookscans #s because those books are sold and not getting returned. What amount does get returned will be determined months from now and for the purpose of the latest best sellers list are taken out of the equation.

Maybe they sprinkle some voodoo adjusting of the numbers to account for “30%” that don’t report sales through Bookscan.

For what it is worth, I believe that more DM stores are using MOBY than using ComicsSuite from Diamond (probably by a factor of two or more)

And IF ComicsSuite is reporting sell-through to Diamond (and I doubt it is), Diamond has not disclosed that, and, so, that would probably be illegal.

-B

1) DC, Viz, Tokyopop aren’t distributed by Diamond Book Distributing. While Diamond is distributing these titles to comicbook stores, wouldn’t they chart lower if available from other distributors?

2) Diamond Book distributes Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, and many smaller presses. Could it be argued that a distributor specializing in graphic novels, distributing many of the larger publishers, would have many titles on a list specializing in graphic novels?

I suspect you are right, that sell-in data is being reported. Could someone run a weekly comparison between BookScan sales and NY Times listings? How much correlation is there? Could someone ask Diamond what sort of data they are supplying to the New York Times?