A Watchmen Number

As always, I am eager not to abuse my access to that vast repository of book-sales information known as BookScan, so I can't just tell you how many copies it says the trade paperback edition of Watchmen sold in the week ending on Sunday.

(Backing up slightly: Watchmen lept massively in the Amazon rankings when a well-received trailer for the movie version screened before a little movie called The Dark Knight last weekend. But the questions of how much Amazon reflects the wider world of bookselling and just what their ranking numbers mean was still open.)

But what I will tell you is the percentage sales increase from the week ending 7/13 to the week ending 7/20: 244 %. (And it's not as is Watchmen was languishing before that; its sales were already a thing to covet and the previous three weeks had seen smaller but still impressive sales increases of 8%, 26%, and 10%.)

So the short form is: even now, twenty years later, after being one of the strongest-selling comics properties ever, there are still thousands and thousands of people who just heard about it and bought the book this week. This implies that even the very most "overexposed" book could still find more readers -- our numbers are small compared to the wider world, so attention from something larger has the potential to drive lots of book-buyers.