From Oricon sales numbers…
Shaman King Zero Volume 1 came in 9th place! With 71,852 sales!
Putting things in perspective… that’s just above what the highest selling KZBs did on their first week. So.. the numbers are pretty good. Next week will be the true telling. The KZBs I think only broke the top 20 in sales two or three weeks in a row (often meaning they needed to sell more than 20,000 copies). If SKZ falls under 20,000 copies next week, that would be slightly disappointing for the series. But we shall see… and we are off to a good start!
Update 5/23:
And Week 2 numbers are out… Shaman King Zero Volume 1 stayed just within the top 20 at rank 19! That puts another 32,271 copies sold. This brings the two week total to 104,123.
So this is probably the last week it will be on the sale chart. I’d be surprised if it sells another 20,000 copies next week. Probably 14,000, but that number would be too low to reach the top 30 list (so the actual count gets a little fuzzy under that).
Now the next thing to check (which is quite hard, unless you are in Japan), is to see when the next printing cycle is. So for example, for launch, they may have ordered 125,000 copies. If they order another say 60,000 copies, that may take a week or two to reach stores. That would line it up with the beginning of next month. To basically “sell-out” on SKZ right now, they would need to sell all remaining 20,000 copies. That’s why it’s hard to say it would sell more than that number of copies, since they probably didn’t print enough yet. I’m sure they will print another batch, just not sure when. The second printing of Shaman King KZB vol 24 happened only 1 month after the initial sales (which showed that more people wanted to buy the volume than actually could, so their numbers were too low).
It’s been so long… I forget how many reprints of Shaman King volume 1 of the original manga had in Japan. It was over 30 or 50 reprints. Of course how many volumes are in each reprint can change. But a minimum is normally 25,000 copies for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump series. Which at that low number means that it was sold over 1.25 million times since it’s first publication of the original volume.
