Earlier this week 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 due to the internet archive being out, or flooded with scraping requests, days one, four and the latter half of day three are not archived.
On day four we saw the beginnings of a drop across the board in the amazon rankings, and in day 5 that drop continued.
The rankings did improve a bit in the late afternoon and for all but Path of Destruction it looked like they may recover a bit but this morning another big drop came and they are once again universally on the downswing. Further interesting was the Path of Destruction, which up until yesterday was the best performing of the three, fell to a distant second and almost was passed by Shatterpoint.
Further interesting is the comparisons with the new trade paperbacks with the older existing mass market paperbacks, which I am tracking as some people are concerned the TPBs will replace the MMPs. Today the second MMP has now retaken the lead over its TPB counterpart.
Heir to the Empire didn't see much change in the overall trends from yesterday. Though the main thing of note is that the TPB seems to be prone to much wilder fluctuations in its rankings than its MMP counterpart.
Path of Destruction finally had the MMP take the lead over the TPB. It had flirted with doing this for a few days now but every time it got close the TPB would get another wave of support that would put it ahead. Today though the MMP not only took the lead but is maintaining a healthy lead over the TPB.
Shatterpoint remains the only holdout where the TPB is still on top. Though the MMP did take the lead briefly and has maintained a close race ever since. The MMP has been historically much more volatile as it fell by 100k ranks in a bit more than a day, only to climb back up that 100k hole in the next day. I think Shatterpoint remains the only hold out despite being the worst ranking of the three TPBs is due to the fact that the novel isn't as popular as the other two, so the MMP has a lot lower floor that it has to overcome than the others.
As for the audiobooks, Nothing has changed from yesterday when it comes to Shatterpoint, as it is still hovering in the 150-200 range. Path of Destruction continues to have its audiobook fall, indicating that whatever wave of new support the the novel had received from these rereleases has subsided. Heir of the Empire meanwhile maintained a high ranking but hasn't passed the control group Plagueis. Plagueis is being used as a comparison here as when there are no new releases it is generally the highest ranking Legends audiobook so if any audiobook is to pass it then it is doing better than it usually is.
Finally the screenshot of the Movie, TV, & Video Game Tie-In Fiction list in the Audiobook section shows Shatterpoint as still the best selling Star Wars Audiobook. Which it has maintained for all 5 days now.
My conclusions from yesterday remain the same. The Audiobook of Shatterpoint continues to do quite well.. The new trade paperbacks however are falling in rankings, with two of the three now being out sold by the mass market paperback editions that have been available for years.
I said I'd continue to track these for a week unless something interesting happens and I will stick to that but at the moment it looks like I'll only be making two more updates to this series. I'll be back tomorrow with what will hopefully not be the penultimate update.
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