Five days after we discovered the previously cancelled Star Wars novel Heart of the Jedi was on Amazon it is still miraculously up. I've been looking into the best seller rankings and archiving them on the Wayback Machine since Friday to track how well it is doing.
Yesterday I mentioned a that I had noticed the fact that Light of the Jedi, the first book in the High Republic series, had its Kindle version discounted at 90% which had caused it to rise to 6th in the science fiction adventure rankings. Well a few hours after I posted that Heart of the Jedi dropped from 4th to 6th, while Light of the Jedi went to 4th.
So after a day at the top Heart of the Jedi is now only the second best selling Star Wars book on Amazon. Though it has actually held on to this quite well.
Despite dropping to 6th it has at least held off the rest of the Science Fiction Adventure list for 6th place for over 12 hours at this point. The overall numbers however do show a downward trend.
After peaking at 26th on the best selling books list it has gradually fallen to 60th, which is still enough to show up on the top 100 list. I figured there would eventually be a drop off as everyone who heard about the book got their copies. Some people are of course buying additional copies while they can, but Sunday and Monday saw the most people talking about this and that traffic has tailed off. This to me says that just about everyone who would want a copy has seen it and gotten theirs. You can see in the google trends.
But bear in mind that it has yet to drop off the lists entirely. It is slowly declining meaning sales numbers aren't increasing but they also haven't fallen off completely, other books may be outselling it now, dropping its overall ranking but it is still selling enough to stay on the list, and hold its place among the other Star Wars books.
The graph for the estimated hourly sales shows this best. While the sales numbers per hour are dropping they are still way above what it was doing before it shot up on the list. I have been informed however that the TCK publishing calculator I had been using does tend to over estimate the numbers by a factor of one third so I've accounted for this in my estimates of the final numbers, and applied that to previous estimates I've made as well. With this modifier I estimate the total sales to be at nearly 1600, with under 600 of that coming in yesterday.
One last thing I found a video that showed the page for the Amazon listing several hours before I started keeping track. Just to show how far this has come, I've included an image that has those numbers to the left, the peak numbers in the middle and the current numbers on the right.
In conclusion, I think the sales numbers and rankings for Heart of the Jedi have hit their peak. But the fall is far slower than I expected and it is still holding out on multiple of the Amazon top 100 lists. Time will tell how much longer it lasts, both on these lists and on Amazon. But as always I'll keep you all updated on what I see.
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