2010 was a year with fairly thin pickings in terms of light novel/novel adaptations. I counted less than 15 new series with books as a source, and 4 of them (Tatami Galaxy, Katanagatari, MM, and Shiki) were done before the adaptation came out, limiting our ability to measure their impact. Thankfully, there was only one series that ran through the anime and didn’t chart; Asobi ni Ikuyo. There’s a wealth of data for the other 9, though.

In any event, the pre/post-anime two-week sales totals of the light novels for which they’re available are recorded here and plotted below.

Note that, for Shinrei Tantei Yakumo, I was tracking the editions of the volumes reissued under Kadokawa; it was originally published by Nihon Bungeisha in the early 2000s, and later had one new volume (9) released before the reissuing finished. It’s irregular for a lot of reasons.

BakaTest

Durarara

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou

Ladies Versus Butlers

Legend of the Legendary Heroes

Mayoi Neko Overrun

Ookami-san

OreImo

Shinrei Tantei Yakumo

Comments:

-A surprising number of series (OreImo, Ookami-san, Daimaou, Overrun; 4 out of the 9 with before/after data) all had main-series runs that were exactly 12 volumes.

-It’s fairly common for a LN release schedule to show successive volumes come out at increasingly slower rates post-anime (when royalties from a bump presumably provides an author with less immediate financial pressure to put out new material constantly). This tendency is punctuated in this sample, where Overrun, Daimaou, and Ladies Versus Butlers all had at least one year-long break between volumes post-anime.

–This week, or really a two-week period, had insanely high thresholds in the mid-20,000s that confused the crap out of me at first. Would have been nice to have that datapoint for Durarara/Ookami-san.