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. Continue reading →