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Since 2020, there’s been a mystery at the heart of the comic book industry: how well are comics actually selling? In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the distribution monopoly held by Diamond Comic Distributors for decades was finally broken when DC signed new distribution deals with Lunar Distribution and other partners, before Marvel Comics, Image Comics, and Dark Horse Comics — amongst many others — followed suit with new deals with Lunar, Penguin Random House, and other companies. While that allowed for more choice and more competitive rates for retailers and customers alike, it meant that Diamond’s sale index, which had tracked the best-selling comics from the entire industry for years, was no more… and nothing came along to replace it.

Until now. Announced during the Retailer Day programming at New York Comic Con 2024, Prana Direct Market Solutions, a consultancy and advisory resource for retailers and publishers alike, unveiled ambitious plans for the first accurate tracker of the comic industry’s health in five years.

“Our goal is to aggregate as much as we can to give them the most accurate view of what the comics industry is doing on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis,” explained Prana’s Atom! Freeman during his presentation. “Why should we be looking at the customers? Because they are going to tell us what is happening, not just in the stunting and the marketing, but what people are actually buying, what they are most interested in. Our goal is to create not just a horse race, not just a ranking that says this person's winning, this person's losing. What we'd like to do is create a system that would show us what the effects of different marketing programs, different announcements, different creators, different in store, sales, different marketing that happens on the ground, and show us what, how that actually affects the sales.”

Using information from more than 200 comic book stores — as well as comic book publishers, with three mentioned as pending final agreements to share sales data — Prana plans to build an index referred to as the Fan Confidence Rating: something that doesn’t just track sales, but also excitement surrounding projects from fans and customers. Don’t worry; they’re also planning on tracking sales, though, including breaking down marketshare by publisher. For those of us who’ve been asking for this information for the past five years, this is a big deal… and something that will finally give a more complete picture of how the comic industry is actually performing.

So, who will be able to access this information? Freeman said that there will be three groups able to see the Fan Confidence Rating when it’s up and running: clients working directly with the company, stores and publishers contributing sales data to Prana, and anyone who signs up to Prana Direct Market Solutions’ weekly newsletter. (You might want to check out Prana's site for more information on that last one.)

More information about the Fan Confidence Rating will be released in coming weeks and months.

Get ready - tickets for NYCC 2024 are on sale now!