Today marks day nine since we discovered that the once cancelled Star Wars novel from the 90s Heart of the Jedi has a paperback listing on Amazon. Since then I have been tracking the rankings of Amazon's various best sellers list and archiving them on the Wayback Machine.
This past day has been honestly not that interesting and as someone who is trying to keep track of these numbers a bit infuriating. Not in that they are declining fast but in that it hasn't really changed that much, making it difficult to tell when Amazon has updated their numbers. The best example of this is the rankings on the Science Fiction Adventures list.
This has been with little exception the exact order for the top four books on this list for over 24 hours
As this is the list that Star Wars books generally perform the best in this means that it has been the best selling Star Wars book for an entire day. But this also makes my job harder as although the lists update every few hours, knowing when they have updated is difficult when nothing changes.
Aside from my own personal gripes about data keeping, this is actually a good sign for Heart of the Jedi as staying so high on the list means that it is still selling, but just not as much as Project Hail Mary, which if you have been following my previous coverage was released just four days ago.
It is however dropping on the overall books list
At the time of writing this it hasn't yet fallen off the top 100 books but I suspect that by later today it will. But a better graph for viewing this recent change is one of the last few days and one comparing three Science Fiction lists with the overall list
One thing about these lists is that each one gets more competitive than the last which is why some of the move more drastically than the others, but what these four show is that the rankings are falling very gradually and it is holding on the more specific lists where it is competing with similar books.
However, though gradual Heart of the Jedi is falling and no chart shows this better than the hourly sales estimates, taken by plugging in the BSR rankings into TCK Publishing's calculator.
Taking these numbers and using trapezoid rule with the .75 modifier accounting for the one third overestimation I've been informed this calculator has, that brings the estimated sales number to around 3400.
Finally as always a look at Google Trends for the last 7 days.
Searching for Heart of the Jedi has been down this past day. Not surprising given the slightly diminishing ratings on the various best seller's lists. What this all means is that there are enough people continuously buying it to maintain the rankings on the more specific lists, but the number of sales isn't increasing every hour so it just sits and either maintains its lead over others or is passed by books that are having an upward trend in hourly sales.
As always time will tell if this continues, and the jury is still out on how much longer it will stay up. I'll continue to keep you all updated as I can.
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