Know It All Industries

Link: http://comipress.com/article/2008/12/31/3733

These are trade collection single volume sales numbers from 2008 in Japan:
(click the title to see the oricon numbers from 2008)

Rank Title (Volume #) Circulation
1 One Piece (50) 1,678,208
2 One Piece (51) 1,646,978
3 Nana 19) 1,645,128
4 One Piece (49) 1,544,000
5 Nana 20) 1,431,335
6 Nodame Cantabile (20) 1,209,551
7 Nodame Cantabile (21) 1,205,037
8 Naruto (43) 1,188,881
9 Naruto (42) 1,092,295
10 Fullmetal Alchemist (19) 1,081,575

I repeat... trade collections. Not new material.

According to this page (http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=23158) Marvel as a whole company sold 113,136 in August. They are the top seller on the chart. Being incredibly kind if we use this number as an average then they sold 1,357,632 in the whole year of every trade they publish. The One Piece books in the top ten alone last year sold more copies then the entire industry in the US...ok, that may or may not be a slight exaggeration. Total Circulation for One Piece was 5,956,540. You can do the math to see if the two numbers are greater or less than.

The point being, what the hell are they doing right? And don't tell me captive train audience. I lived on those trains and people read alot of comics on them. But Jump is usually read weekly in the big fat collection. You have to actually want to read these again to go get the collections.