Posted in: Comics | Tagged: amazing spider-man, Comics, marvel, Marvel Comics

Breaking Down Amazing Spider-Man #1's Half Million Pre-Orders

Published Wed, 02 Apr 2014 11:00:42 -0500

Last updated Wed, 02 Apr 2014 11:16:47 -0500

CBR has reported that Marvel has told them that Amazing Spider-Man #1 has had over half a million pre-orders from retailers.

Marvel has informed CBR exclusively that April's "Amazing Spider-Man" #1 has passed 500,000 copies in initial retailer orders. An exact number was not made available, and may change following next week's order cutoff.

Bleeding Cool has been tracking retailer advance reorders for the last few weeks – and how Amazing Spider-Man was.

There's also a good chance that a good chuck of those are Custom Variant Retailer Covers, where a retailer can order a minimum of three thousand copies with an exclusive cover for their store. They may not sell them all, at least immediately, but they can create promotion for their store, incentive for out of state customers and get extra promotion from Marvel for their efforts – and dollars. If fifty stores went for this deal, that's 150-200,000 sales right there, which will not be expected to be sold right away.

Then there are the variants available to everyone. Such as the recently added Amazing Spider-Man #1 Opena Sketch Variant where, for every 200 copies retailers order of Amazing Spider-Man #1, retailers will get one of these, which they might then be able to sell for north of $500.

But it's not alone.

For every fifty copies, you can order one copy of the Marcos Martin cover. For every seventy-five copies, you can order one Ed McGuinness cover and of the Alex Ross cover. Or one of the Alex Ross sketch cover version for every three hundred copies. If you exceed 150% of orders for Superior Spider-Man #24 regular covers, you can order as many of the colour Jeremy Opena cover or of the Blank Sketch cover. 200% gets you access to order the Skottie Young cover.

I've also been told for certain stores, Marvel have got in the habit of doubling certain retailer orders for free. Which don;t show up in the revenue statistics but do count in the unit item statistics – even if the retailer didn't order them. This happened for the launch of Guardians Of The Galaxy and for the first appearance of Angela…

So basically, excellent sales all round, but the extent of those sales reported by CBR might be an outlier rather than representative of anything else going on in the comics industry.

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