Yesterday I shared some numbers I had been gathering from Amazon's rankings of Heart of the Jedi. While they were good they were admittedly falling off and by the time I had posted it and the conclusions I had made were already out of date. Today though I have some much better news as well as another way I found of tracking the numbers.
So first off as a recap, Amazon has various bestsellers lists that it says it updates every hour, but in my experience updates every 2-3 hours. I've been tracking these numbers since Friday, archiving the Amazon listing page for Heart of the Jedi every time it updates on the Wayback Machine, and charting the numbers to see how it is doing. I have been doing this for both the Science Fiction Adventure Rankings, and the Overall Books Rankings, also called BSR. Though the latter you can only get by visiting the actual listing for Heart of the Jedi as the Overall Best Sellers list only shows the top 100.
And here are the results:
After dropping below the top 50, there was a 10% sale that got shared around and almost immediately it jumped to 16th for the highest it has ever hit. It even managed to reach 47th on the Overall Science Fiction Rankings. Not only that but it carried through with that momentum throughout the night and into today. Looking into the overall rankings we get the following:
A much more consistent line after the spike. In fact, despite staying at the same rank for the past two updates on the Science Fiction Adventure list on the overall list it actually jumped 17 spots showing just how competitive the former list is.
And in case you are curious here is what google trends looked like:
But there was one thing I wanted to see and that was to see if there is a way we can get actual sales data from this and in fact there is. There is a website TCK Publishing that has a calculator where you can plug in a book's BSR rating (or where it is in the overall best sellers ranking for books) and give an estimate into both the daily and monthly sales. As Amazon tracks these by the hour and each update comes every 2-3 we can chart hourly sales by plugging in the overall rankings into the calculator and dividing by 24. Doing so gets us to this.
Now assuming that the calculator on TCK Publishing is accurate, and that the per hour sales remained constant for the 2-3 hours that it takes for Amazon to update the public numbers, then according to these numbers, I estimate that over 400 copies of Heart of the Jedi have been sold since Friday. In the meantime, I'll do my best to keep you guys updated as long as I can. Also, don't forget that tomorrow we are likely to get the results from the Hasbro poll so keep your eyes out for that as well.
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