At the time of writing, this which half past noon EST on Sunday May 9th, Heart of the Jedi is no longer on Amazon. I can still see it when going to the best seller's lists but it has no price. Indicating this change has happened within the past few hours.
For those not in the know on April 30th we found out that the once cancelled EU novel from the 90s Heart of the Jedi was listed on Amazon and being printed at cost. Since then I have been keeping track of the various best sellers lists to see how it is doing and extrapolating the sales numbers from that. This has been archived on the Wayback Machine with 58 snapshots from April 30th to May 9th which is now the only way we can view these things. As I can still see the rankings I can give the last known places on each of these lists. and the overall data.
First with the Science Fiction Adventures list, which is where Star Wars books preform the best.
After being ahead of every other Star Wars book on this list for over two days Heart of the Jedi was finally passed by the audiobook of Thrawn Ascendency Greater Good right before it was taken down.
It was also still on the overall books best seller's list right up until the end. In fact it was even making a bit of comeback. You can see this a lot more clearly by looking at the graph of rankings since May 6th.
Just to cover my bases these are the standings for the 3 other lists as it was taken down.
(Note that by the time you read this these lists will most likely no longer show Heart of the Jedi, hence why I provided the Wayback Machine Links, also by going to the links for some reason Heart of the Jedi's cover image doesn't load on any of them which is a recurring problem among all archives I've done)
I also now have something approximating the final sales numbers through this graph of sales per hour, which is an estimate taking the BSR ranking and putting it into TCK Publishing's calculator. This website of course gives an over estimation so a modifier is required.
With these numbers I estimate that the final number of copies of Heart of the Jedi sold to be nearly 4400. For comparison, the 2015 Lulu edition most likely had less than 100 copies printed.
Finally a look at the Google Trends
It was actually projected to go up again, meaning we may have another wave of people buying it and another wave of it going up on the charts. Still though it was up for 67 days, and 10 days after us finding it. For comparison the Lulu edition in 2015 was up for just 3 days.
At the end of the day we all knew this wouldn't last, but I don't think any of us thought it would get this far. If it was finally taken down by Disney, Amazon, or the person that uploaded it, we will probably never know. But it has still been a wild ride and I'm glad that you all could join me for it. And if you never got a chance to get a copy don't worry, it is always available for free at Starwarstimeline.net
P.S.
Thank you to everyone who liked, commented or shared these articles. I wasn't initially planning on making all of this public until after it had been taken down, but Chris convinced me to put up my findings as I got them and I'm glad I did. Had it not been for your support I might not have stuck with this through the end. I don't know when I'll be back or what I'll cover next but I can only hope it will be as interesting and wild as this.
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