January
12 EW on "Off the Charts"

Thom Geier at EW emailed this morning to clarify and explain the events surrounding the story we posted a few days ago about their graphic novel sales charts:

There seems to be a lot of misinformation circling about the best-seller chart that ran in Entertainment Weekly's Jan. 12 issue. Since I edit the magazine's Books section, I'd like to clear a few things up. In the last year, we've occasionally run sales charts from regional bookstores and comics stores (L.A.'s Golden Apple, Arizona's Poisoned Pen, Houston's Murder by the Book). In December, we contacted New York's Midtown Comics about obtaining a chart to run in the Jan. 12 issue; many stores need time to compile data, so we called well in advance of our deadline. Contrary to some reports, we did contact Midtown Comics. In fact, one of our staffers went to the store in person and spoke to book buyer David Webster, who said that we should simply pull whatever data we wanted from the "top sellers" chart that the store puts on its website. That is precisely what we did.

There's been much discussion about the fact that two of the titles on the list we published -- Cowboys & Aliens and Dark Tower [Sketchbook] -- were free giveaways and listed as such on the Midtown Comics site. I'm puzzled about why a retailer would list a free product on its "top sellers" chart, but no matter. We regret that we did not note this distinction in print, and plan to publish a clarification in our Jan. 26 issue, due on newsstands Jan. 19.   

Thom Geier
Senior Editor, Entertainment Weekly