EU by the Numbers: additional analysis of Star Wars Legends series
A bit over two months ago I set out to find out what were the best and worst books in the EU. Not by one person's opinion, but the opinions of the masses to get a rough estimation of what the fans consider to be the best and worst books. In that quest I scoured five of the most popular websites that allow users to give ratings to books. These being Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and anobii. I compiled all 1,522,923 user ratings on those sites of the over 280 EU novels into excel sheets so I can break down that data. Last month I compared the books to each other, ranking them and then breaking down the numbers further first looking at the adult novels, then the YA novels then all together. If you just want to see that or an explanation in how I got the numbers and the methods I used to calculate them you can do read it here.
Today I want to show off some additional findings I compiled when putting together the rankings for each of these series.
But first I think it is important to state what I consider a series. Well I don't exactly have a hard definition for it but generally took every series of books that has an official or unofficial series name or grouping. Books that were released as part of a greater story like NJO, LOTF and FOTJ are of course counted, as are books that have a common thread such as the Callistia trilogy and Jax Pavan saga. I will also only be comparing these series with each other so all lists in this analysis will not include any books that are not a part of a series, either officially or not.
So first I want to show something similar that I did with the authors, in what is the best and works rated books in each series. That table looks like this.
The other thing I looked into was specifically with Trilogies. By my count of including both official and unofficial there are 21 trilogies in Star Wars legends literature . I wanted to see some common trends among the trilogies. Mainly which book in the trilogy is the highest and lowest rated. That results in this graph.
Interestingly the second book in the trilogy is nearly equally likely to be the highest rated as it is to be the lowest. But the first book in the trilogy is almost twice as likely to be the worst book in that trilogy than the best, where as the third book is the opposite, being over twice as likely to be the best rated than the worst.
I also looked into which books in a trilogy had the most and least amount of ratings. Which was exactly what you'd expect.
So that is all I have on the Series, but I will be back soon with my analysis of breaking these numbers down based on stories. But in the meantime let us know what you think? How did your favorite books in these series do? Are there are any series that I left off or included that you don't think should be there? And if you have any other ideas on how to look at this data I've collected let us know. I'll be back on Monday with further analysis
This article is part of a series of articles, click here for the previous article in the series.
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