For a couple of reasons, I’ve been going through the manga and light novels first adapted in 2010 to gauge if and how their sales changed after the anime adaptation aired. This data is currently being gathered (manga info is collected, but it needs to be turned into plots, haven’t started on LNs). Before diving into an analysis of those boosts, though, I’ve noticed a very important point that pertains some specific earlier posts of mine. Namely, first week manga sales, while rarely smaller than second week sales as is common with light novels, aren’t all that consistent.

In the 2011 post, only the second one I made on manga, I was tracking sequels as well as first seasons, and, more importantly, I was looking at first week sales only. This is the resulting chart for Bakuman:

This is the same series with first week data replaced with first two weeks data:

That’s a lot less volume-to-volume variation. Bakuman isn’t the only Fall 2010 series where this makes a difference. Here’s The Wold God Only Knows with one week of data:

Contrast that with the two week data chart:

The boost in this case is *much* more obvious.

So basically, the difference between 2 and 7 days of sales (for one Oricon chart week) is much greater than the difference between 9 and 14 days of sales (for two Oricon chart weeks). It has the potential power to erase some very obvious post-anime gains. Combined with what we already know about series like Kamisama Hajimemashita where series sometimes take months to show the effects of an anime bump, this reinforces the notion that manga sales should be parsed cautiously; it’s very hard to be sure that a boost *didn’t* occur for any given series when it may be charting across 2 weeks.

I’ll be rehashing the following posts to include 2 weeks rather than 1 (like the 2013 manga post does), and will pack the whole thing into a megapost at some point:

https://animetics.net/2013/07/27/fun-with-numbers-anime-as-manga-advertisments-in-2011-part-1-the-solid-baselines/

https://animetics.net/2013/11/11/fun-with-numbers-anime-as-manga-advertisments-in-2011-part-2-the-upper-limit-baselines/

https://animetics.net/2013/12/12/fun-with-numbers-anime-as-manga-advertisments-in-2012-and-their-respective-myanimelist-ranks/

While the most evident boosts will obviously still be there, and some series still will not show gains, it should make borderline cases a bit clearer. I’m going to be using this data in the endgame to craft a much more advanced sequel probability equation, so I need it as accurate as I can manage, even if that means redoing a crapton of tedious plots.