For those not aware Heart of the Jedi is available on Amazon. This being a cancelled Star Wars book from the Bantam era that was just six years ago released online by Starwarstimeline.net . It was also briefly made available shortly after the final chapter was released online in physical form for a few days before eventually getting shut down.
But now we are a few days after word getting out about it being available again and I have been archiving the amazon page on the wayback machine to keep track of the Amazon rankings and sales numbers. (note some screenshots were interrupted by an amazon capcha making those useless but there is still a good amount of screenshots that do show the rankings)
Now in the process of researching for another article that should be coming out this Friday, I looked into tracking the rankings of a single product over time but unfortunately there is no method of doing so without paying for a service leaving the only option to do it manually.
example of what to look for
Amazon claims that these numbers update every hour but in my experience it is more like every two hours. Additionally if you go to the top 100 list, that list seems to update an hour prior to the rankings on the page for the item you are looking for. I have collected the data for the rankings for Science Fiction Adventures, as this is the list that Star Wars books perform the best at and is a list I can search. But I also looked at the overall rankings for books as this compares it to every book that is on the site, though as this full list only shows the top 100, any book outside the top 100 will only show their rankings here when you check the page for the actual listing.
My method was to check in on the listing page for Heart of the Jedi every few hours, have the Wayback Machine take a screenshot of the page and write down the ranking for both books and science fiction adventures as well as the date and time in GMT of when that screenshot was taken. There are of course some gaps in the data as I had to sleep at some point but after two days I graphed what I found so we can see how it is doing.
Obviously I don't have all the data as by the time I started looking the original article had been up for nearly half a day, but when I first looked and saw it had reached 69 on the SFA list I went to looking at what books it was out performing the Audiobooks of Heir to the Empire, Thrawn Alliances and Thrawn Treason, and was only one spot behind the audiobook of Darth Plagueis.
Then it shot up to 27 and was now outselling every star wars book with the exception of the Hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook version of Thrawn Ascendency Greater Good, which was just released on the 27th of April, and pre orders of the Thrawn Ascendency Lesser Evil. With one or two exceptions it has consistently outsold every other edition of every other Star wars book, which includes the aforementioned books, the original Thrawn book and first High Republic book. It seems to spike around midday then fall back down later in the day and repeat that process the next day but it is consistently staying within the 20-40 range of the list
Overall also saw a similar spike and the rising and falling of the rankings as the evenings come in. This is of course all on the U.S. site so I don't know how the international sites are doing or if they even have different rankings but it has held strong at least in respect to the U.S. store.
I also wanted to see how word was spreading about it so I looked up Heart of the Jedi on Google trends and got this for the past 7 days
It is a lot of peaks and valleys and if you expand the span of the search you get this even more pronounced peaks with a lot of valleys of nothing, I think as google is condensing multiple days into data points once you set it to over a year. But in the 7 day one where they can't really do that what you see is sporadic peaks here and there and by the 30th you get a lot more frequent and consistent peaks. Indicating more people searching for it.
Granted this is all after just a few days. At this point I think all hopes of this flying under the radar are squashed and it is just a question of how long can the book preform this well before it is taken down. If you want this book and haven't gotten it yet you need to act fast because I don't see this lasting much longer.
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