- Dylan Kling
Day 2 of Essential Legends Amazon rankings
A couple days ago the first wave of the Essential Legends Collection hit the shelves. This included new Trade Paperback Editions of Heir to the Empire, Darth Bane Path of Destruction and Shatterpoint. All would receive new cover art and Shatterpoint would even get an unabridged audiobook. Now as any longtime readers know last month I used the Amazon best sellers ranking system to track how well the once lost novel Heart of the Jedi was doing. I wanted to do something similar with these books just to see how they do in their opening week.
My methods and reasoning for choosing the lists to track that I did can be found in the first article in this series. Additionally, the wayback machine archives of these pages can be found here, though as Internet Archive was down most of Tuesday the first day of data was not archived.
Starting off day two are the three graphs for the Best Selling books list, Space Opera List, and the list where they are ranked the highest. These are all for the new trade paperbacks as amazon actually tracks each format of a book separately.
All 3 books bounced back a bit around midday yesterday but then started to fall off by the evening. Path of Destruction continues to do the best with Heir to the Empire in second and Shatterpoint in third. Path of Destruction is also the only one that hasn't fallen below the first ranking I have a record of.
I also tracked the mass market paperback editions on the overall books list to see how they were doing in comparison to the trade paperback. Yesterday the results were mixed but today although they are still mixed they are trending in the same direction.
Heir to the Empire continued to see a decline in the rankings for both the TPB and MMP, though the later maintained its lead over the former. the TPB did briefly take the lead for one 3 hour period but was quickly surpassed again and has been declining at a much faster rate.
Path of Destruction has had its TPB lead comfortably all day with a lot of mirrored moves between the TPB and MMP. However, the MMP has made a comeback in this last window and drastically closed the gap while the TPB saw a fall in rankings.
Shatterpoint also saw a similar trend to Path of Destruction, though in its case the TPB ranking has fallen slightly while the MMP ranking has risen quite dramatically. I think the reason this one hasn't had its TPB drop as drastically as the others is due to more people looking for this one online as physical retailers haven't seemed to stock it as well as the other two books in this wave. But overall it seems that the MMPs are making a comeback and at the rate they are going should take the lead again on all fronts by tomorrow.
Finally, the Shatterpoint Audiobook continued to be the best performer of the day. Though it also saw a dip in its ratings from yesterday.
Though it is recovering as of this morning, it hasn't hit the peaks that it did yesterday but it is trending in that direction.
Something that I forgot to mention yesterday when I showed the screenshot of the audiobook on the Movie, TV, & Video game Tie-in Fiction list was that Shatterpoint was the highest-ranking Star Wars audiobook on that list, and that fact still holds true today, with it outranking the newest Thrawn books, and newest High Republic books for two days now.
You also may have noticed that Path of Destruction is also doing quite well, though it still trails the newer Canon books it isn't that far behind. I wasn't expecting this as there isn't anything new about the Bane Audiobook aside from the cover art but it seems people are picking it up as well. Heir to the Empire is not in the top 100 of this list curiously. So it would seem that the new covers aren't influencing people to but that one.
This last day was a bit more of the same, there was a bit of a peak to the rankings but they didn't hit their day one highs before falling again. Most interesting of course is the fact that the Darth Bane audiobook is doing so well despite there not being anything new about it aside from the cover. But I'll keep covering this for the next week and will keep you all updated on how these books are doing.
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