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 the only days archived are two and three as the Internet Archive was down for day 1 and about halfway through day 4 it was taking hours to begin the process of updating just one of the 11 web pages I was tracking.
(just under 21 hours for one capture)
Overall day 4 saw a trend of each book falling in rankings.
There was a bit of a universal dip right after I posted the last update, the numbers seemed to recover for a bit but eventually dropped to new lows. Interestingly during the late afternoon Heir and Shatterpoint had a mini dip where as Bane continued on an upward trajectory, indicating that it endured whatever slump the rest of the titles were facing. It has been the best performing of the 3 since I started keeping track and that trend continued.
As for the comparisons with the mass market paperbacks it is more of the same.
Heir to the Empire saw the gap between the TPB and MMP widen even further, with the MMP in a comfortable lead. There was a bit when the TPB closed the gap in the late into the night but that ended by the morning.
Path of Destruction during the last update had the TPB and MMP neck and neck, which remained the case for the first update only for the TPB to eventually outpace it again. Though they are now looking like they may meet again, it has done this a few times now so odds are the TPB will likely pull away again.
Shatterpoint was looking like the TPB was going to run away with it and that trend continued for a while, though the MMP has caught up but is once again falling. This graph is a bit misleading about Shatterpoint as it looks like the TPB isn't changing that much but that's due to the scale and if you look at the first two graphs you will see the variance better. I do wonder though what has caused such a drastic wave of people buying the MMP of Shatterpoint, as the dip seemed to indicate it going back to around where the number sits normally only to almost reach the new TPB ratings..
As for the audiobooks, Shatterpoint continues its lead at the top but hasn't broken out of the 150-200 rank mark. Whatever momentum was keeping Heir to the Empire and Path of Destruction up near Plagueis seems to be gone as Plagueis (which is here as a control group for comparisons) is running away with it while the former two fall. It seems that I noticed the bump that the new paperback editions were giving the audiobooks at the tail end of it and now that seems to be over.
Finally the screenshot of the Movie, TV, & Video Game Tie-In Fiction list in the Audiobook section
Overall aside from the Shatterpoint Audiobook the first wave seems to have gotten past the initial hype stage and is falling. This may be temporary as generally they tend to pick up in the afternoon but we'll see. I'll be back tomorrow with another update.
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