This is the commentary on the sales charts. Previously:
Manga Top 500
Top 50 Series
Publishers’ Scorecard
Manga Midlist 500

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Trivia: I spent about 15 hours this week on these damn charts.

Yes, I could re-watch all of Neon Genesis Evangelion (including the movies) in the amount of time I just wasted figuring out that Naruto and Death Note are outselling all the other manga.

Aside from the fact that I don’t particularly want to put myself through Eva again (oh, sure, it’s all fun and games and bad versions of “Fly Me to the Moon” and Asuka and Rei in skintight flightsuits and giant robots and giant robots fighting giant robots up until ep 24… but then it isn’t even downhill, it’s torture… I’m getting flashbacks… dude, how frickin’ appropriate is it that they used Beethoven’s Ninth, considering Kubrick/Burgess/McDowell…)

Anyway, Yes. There is a chunk of my life I’m not getting back.

Getting back on topic: I really like my new chart. 500 is a nice, big round number. We all like big round numbers. …and the new data set is huge. I can play around with these numbers for quite some time. Heck, after going through the usual motions I folded the two back upon themselves and got the spreadsheet to spit out a third chart.

I like numbers. They’re fun. You should be grateful 1. that someone with the right kind of insanity decided to look into this niche of book sales and 2. that I was already used to posting things to a blog.

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I’m crazy, not stupid. Part of what I’ve been doing (and part of the three month hiatus) was teaching my spreadsheet to make value judgements, and compartmentalizing the process so that eventually (when I find an extra $200 a month) I can outsource the data entry to India. No, Really.

It isn’t programming, by any stretch, but if you stack IF functions in the right way
=IF(Y2=Y1;W2+Z1;W2)
=IF(Y2=Y3;” “;Z2)
then the spreadsheet will compare a line entry to the one above it and below it and spit out a number. One can have a running tally in one column, and then also see a total (at odd intervals, whenever there’s a new title as input) in the next column. If you set it up right.

After you get the scores and re-sort the whole mess, then depending on how you define your fields (in this case– rank : =IF(C2=0;”↔”;(IF(C2<0;"↓";"↑"))) : =IF(D2=0;"new";D2-A2) : last weeks rank : title : iteration : volume# : publisher : pub date : total score ) with a single function

=CONCATENATE("[b]";A2;".[/b] ";B2;C2;" (";D2;") : ";F2;" ";G2;" ";H2;" - ";J2;" ";(TEXT(K2;"mmm yyyy"));" [";L2/10;"] ::")

You get

1. ↔0 (1) : Death Note 1 - Viz Shonen Jump Advanced Oct 2005 [608.6] ::

That’s the output to a single field, ready to be cut-n-paste to a text file (or a blog entry).
Excluding setup, takes about a minute.

highlight, select, fill down… It’s complicated but I’m teaching the spreadsheet to do all the work for me — and this copies over from week to week so if I’m lucky I’ll only have to overheat my brain three of four times before putting a lot of this on autopilot.

Exhibits A-D: Top 500, Top 50 Series, the Publishers’ Scorecard, and the Manga Midlist

Of course, you have no reason to believe me. Yet. But if I can find ten hours each week for data entry, then yes, this is the new status quo, the new Manga Sales Post.

(Or should that be posts, plural?)