Warren Ellis talks numbers ....

One great thing about Warren Ellis (aside from the obvious of being a bloody great writer) is that he's the comic equivalent of the magician revealing his tricks. He's always talked about the mechanics and ideas behind the genre. And Ellis' ideas of what makes the business end of the comic market work are always worth reading.
He's also never been scared of putting cold hard numbers up to talk about his work. Take this from warrenellis.com:

We just got the numbers on NO HERO 0. The initial orders have come in at 18000. That’s the same number we had for initial orders on BLACK SUMMER 0, a project on which we did the same thing. The reorders on that book were so massive that we eventually sold twice that number — and that’s before we did the special reprint book that contained 0 and 1 because the reorder action on issue one also wiped out the overprint (copies printed above and beyond the order number). So we did a 100% overprint on the issue 0 unit and still couldn’t meet the eventual demand.
NO HERO appears to be following the same pattern. Now, how does this affect you, the potential interested party who’d like to read it?

Ellis has long been one of the most interesting characters in comics. But what he contributes to the backend is pretty important as well. There just isn't enough of a dialogue going on, and there never has been, regarding the retail side of the business.