Buffy The Vampire Slayer

From The Engine Website :

"quote: orders exceeded the initial printing of over 100,000 copies!"

And here’s the thing. Printing numbers aren’t set until the order numbers are in. And no-one wants to sell out a print run inside 24 hours of release, so you look at the numbers and you set an overprint, an additional number of copies to satisfy re-order demand.

Lots and lots of books have been selling through their overprints like wildfire. More and more, in fact. And I can tell you that the overprint percentages aren’t being reduced on my books, many if not most of which have been selling out lately.

So what the fuck is going on, that the market cannot guess the demand for BUFFY, SEASON EIGHT, EXCLUSIVELY TOLD IN COMICS AND WRITTEN BY JOSS, to the extent that the overprint is fucking VAPORISED something like twelve hours after the book hit the shelves?

The rest of The Engine is somewhat more cynical:

“[They’re i]ntentionally using scarcity to create demand, I’d wager, although it’s possible here that they were simply too conseravtive.”

“I always assume they want it to sell out, so they can putting out PR’s like this.”

“My guess is that is was indeed to sell exactly the way it did... Who wouldn’t want to be able to say, ‘We’ve got Joss! He’s doing Buffy! Number one sold out! Reprints available with striking special cover! Issue number two follows in only one week! Don’t dare miss it!’ Those exclamation points could go a long from turning a just over 100,000 sales mark into a nearly 300,000 sales mark. Some of which may be for repeat orders just to get the variant cover. Of course, I could be wrong. But if it wasn’t intentional that way, I think it should have been.”