drumore wrote:
I've discovered that drawing conclusions about sales based on initial orders is like predicting the winner of the Indy 500 based on the starting lineup. It may give some indication, but it's the long race that matters. New Teen Titans Archives had low initial orders, but steady sales and reorders afterwards.
Are you saying you have personal knowledge of multiple Archives volumes that had much lower initial orders than other Archives released around the same time that came back to outsell those other Archives within the span of a few years?

Average initial orders estimates for Archives released in 1999-2000 was 3200, 1000 more than NTT #1. With the exception of NTT and Shazam, all of the Archives released in 1999 got follow-up volumes within 18 months, but NTT didn't get a second volume for over 5 years. NTT #1 didn't get a second printing until the last couple of years, one of the longest waits ever. It may have had "steady sales and reorders", but are you saying it actually caught and surpassed other Archives issued around the same time that had "head starts" of up to 1600 units sold?

I absolutely understand and agree that re-orders are important and that initial sales are just estimates, but I find it hard to believe that Archives with estimated advance sales of 25%-50% below their contemporaries catch and surpass those contemporaries. At least I would think it's rare enough that it's pretty safe to draw some general conclusions (such as Silver Age sells better than any other Age and superheroes sell better than any other genre) based on advance sales.