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 7 saw for the third day in a row a drop in the rankings followed by a recovery that did not reach the previous peak.
Heir to the Empire and Path of Destruction continued to battle it out for the best spot of the three, with Heir to the Empire in the lead at the time of writing this. Shatterpoint did take second for a bit of time as Path of Destruction fell to third but that lasted just one update.
Heir to the Empire saw its mass market paperback rise in rankings while the trade paperback fell. Both are back to trending upwards but the MMP has a large lead.
A similar thing happened to Path of Destruction though its TPB fell about 9 hours after Heir to the Empire's fell. Again the MMP has maintained a comfortable lead for the 4th day in a row.
Shatterpoint remains the only holdout through week one where the TPB is outselling the MMP. Again the MMP got close to passing it in the early evening but failed to do so.
In 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 after falling briefly have recovered but hasn't reached the Plagueis.
Late last night Shatterpoint briefly had its 6 day reign as the best selling Star Wars book spoiled by Thrawn Ascendency. But as of this morning Shatterpoint is back in first among Star Wars books, though not by much.
So my overall thoughts are that generally this first wave did what I expected. I figured the Audiobook being the only new thing would chart pretty well, and the others would do better than their MMP counterparts for a while. I did not expect Path of Destruction to be the best performer of the three, nor did I expect the audiobooks for it and Heir to the Empire to receive a boost.
I also did not think that Shatterpoint would be the final holdout for outpacing the MMP. I figured all would eventually lose out as the MMP is cheaper and more familiar, and that the hype for the new editions would be temporary. I also thought that hype would last until the weekend, petering out around Sunday when in actuality they started to fall as early as Saturday.
All in all it was mainly what I expected. While I don't think any of these new releases have reached where they will ultimately sit on the Amazon rankings I do think that the initial wave is over and that they will continue to fall. The only thing of note left is when will Shatterpoint's audiobook's reign at the top of the Star Wars audiobooks end but that will probably be all that I will continue to track from this. Thank you for following this series. I may be back if and when the Shatterpoint Audiobook falls but otherwise I have a new idea for an article that I am currently working on that may not come out for a while as it is going to take a lot of work. So until then
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