A few 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.
As for day 3 looking at the graphs for the Best Selling books list, Space Opera List this day saw a lot of similar trends to day 2. I'm going to stop including the best rankings list in these updates as they aren't really contributing much, but I will keep updating them on my own graphs just in case they start to get interesting and will add them back into the updates if something changes.
Quite literally in the update after I put out yesterday's article all three saw a jump in their rankings . One thing I didn't expect was for Heir of the Empire to come back and challenge Path of Destruction for the best selling of the three. They traded the spot back and forth all day yesterday through this morning. Shatterpoint meanwhile hit its all time low since I've been keeping track and has since rebounded and is closing the gap with the other two.
Though the biggest change is in some predictions I made yesterday about the mass market paperbacks outpacing the trade paperbacks by today.
For Heir to the Empire that almost didn't happen as the TPB made a major comeback going back and forth with the MMP until this morning when the MMP once again took the lead.
Path of Destruction had its TPB pull away from the MMP and maintain that lead all day, only to virtually lose it this morning. the TPB is still ahead but just barely.
With Shatterpoint there was no contest, the TPB held firm all day while the MMP plummeted down the rankings. I'm going to stop making predictions because whatever the numbers are doing at the time I write these gets completely reversed by the next time Amazon updates the numbers.
For the graph tracking the Shatterpoint audiobook I decided to do something new and track the other two audiobooks along side it. Unfortunately due to how amazon's rankings data aren't archived unless you do it manually I don't have the data for the first two days. I also included the rankings of the audiobook for Darth Plagueis as it is generally the best performing Legends Audiobook and thus makes a good benchmark for if they are doing good on this list or not.
Expectedly Shatterpoint is doing the best, with Heir to the Empire outpacing the Plagueis audiobook, Path of Destruction was lower ranked at first but started to close the gap a bit but is once again falling off. My purpose in tracking the other two was to see how the new TPBs and Shatterpoint audiobook were effecting the others. So far it is minimal but still present but I really wish I had the foresight to track this earlier.
I will also stop including the various audiobook categories in these updates unless something happens as they aren't changing that much. Though if you are curious about the Videogame, TV, & Video Game Tie-In Fiction list Shatterpoint is still leading all other Star Wars audiobooks on that list.
I apologize for getting this out so late, the wayback machine was loading pages slow today and it is a lot of work archiving all these amazon pages. Just to give you an idea this is about how many chrome tabs it is taking to do this efficiently.
I'll be back tomorrow with another update. At the moment I don't plan on doing this for more than a week but that could change if these last 4 days prove to be interesting.
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