Last 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.
Day 6 saw the continuing overall trend of the three new trade paperback falling in the rankings. Though there was a bit where a couple were looking like they would make a comeback.
Path of Destruction, despite being the most popular of the three rankings wise for the first four days continued its steady decline in the rankings. Heir to the Empire and Shatterpoint however got a huge surge that pushed them up the charts in the early evening. Shatterpoint at one time was even ahead of the other two for this first time since I started tracking these numbers. This wouldn't last however as Shatterpoint fell quite drastically with Heir having a more gradual decline. Path of Destruction is now back in the lead after a late surge this morning but even with the bump in rankings they are still all trending down.
During that late night surge Heir to the Empire briefly saw its new TPB edition overtake the MMP but again only briefly before the MMP retook the lead. It seems that while the TPB can compete in small burst overall the MMP has been outperforming it.
Path of Destruction meanwhile has seen two days of dominance by the MMP over the TPB, but a fall from the former and a push by the latter have them trending towards a lead change. Tomorrow will tell if this will be a temporary one like we see with Heir to the Empire or if the TPB will be the one more often on the top
Shatterpoint still remains the only holdout where the TPB is still on top. Interestingly the MMP didn't drop as low as it did yesterday and seems to be on another upswing, but historically it hasn't been able to close the gap and pass the newer TPB more than once. In this case it looks like the TPB is the better performing of the two.
As for the audiobooks, Shatterpoint is still ahead of the others, with the control group Plagueis holding firm as expected, and the Heir to the Empire and Path of Destruction audiobooks falling in the rankings. Again the latter two didn't get new audiobooks so this was only to see if they were getting a boost from the new TPBs, which does seem to be the case though it doesn't look like it lasted that long.
More worrying for Shatterpoint was that it is now falling on the audiobook only lists. It maintained a spot in the 150-200 range but has now fallen out of the top 200 overall, and isn't faring as good on the more specific categories lists.
Where it was consistently top 5 in all three charts for most of the last 6 days it has now fallen out of the top 5 in all. It is still the best ranking Star Wars audiobook on the site but this fall is causing the newer audiobooks to close that gap
The late night push from the Shatterpoint and Heir to the Empire's TPBs were nice to see but they appear to not be enough to slow the downward trend. The Shatterpoint audiobook falling in the rankings after almost an entire week of dominance is also concerning, though that fall happened only recently and may just be a minor fall in the opposite way that the Shatterpoint and Heir to the Empire TPBs had a small bump.
It's looking like tomorrow will be the last update I will do on this story at least for a while. I wanted to cover these new releases in their opening week to see how well they did and how long they could do it. Now it seems the initial hype has ended and they are settling in to where they will more commonly slot in these charts.
I will give an overall wrap up into my thoughts and how the results lined up to what I expected in tomorrows update. But if you guys are still interested in this and want me to continue tracking this, or tracking one aspect of this let me know and I'll consider it. Otherwise I'll be back tomorrow for what will most likely be the final day of results and wrap up.
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