Lit Star Wars books in the New York Times Best Seller List

On August 16, 2019, the Star Wars Books (@DelReyStarWars) created an impromptu AMA (Ask Me Anything), and I asked if there was a list of the Star Wars books that ever reached the New York Times Best Seller List. They answered:



Well, I became that enterprising fansite. After reviewing more than 4 decades of public NYT records, below is the link to the compilation of all the Star Wars related books that have made the coveted Fiction Best Seller List.

Please visit my website for an analysis and a complete list:

https://puerto-pirata-veracruz.blogspot.com/2019/08/star-wars-books-in-new-york-times-best.html

 

This is pretty cool. Congrats on all the hard work.

I should note that Heir to the Jedi, Lords of the Sith, and Dark Disciple all made the NYT list prior to Aftermath. So Aftermath was not the first canon novel on the NYT.

 

Thanks!
Looks like the NYT has cropped their public records to the first 15 places, which definitely has skewed my list.

 

That's because the current list is only 15 books long, so they probably cropped the records to have them reflect the current lists. It was 20, then 18, now 15. Which is clearly just a means of creating artificial scarcity on the list to just, make the list seem more and more important.

The NYT has changed their lists, list size, etc. over the years, which is why when anyone compares books making the list over any period of time I just laugh and then dismiss them. Because you aren't comparing two equal things. They're barely too related things at this point and that doesn't even account for individual weeks being hard to compare based on book mix. Did you hit #1 the week a bunch of massive authors (Lee Child, Danielle Steele types) also had books out? Or did you hit #1 on a week where nothing else of note got published?

For instance - the week A New Dawn was published, the list was trimmed from 25 down to 23 (or 21, the exact number evades me). A New Dawn would have made the list if the book was published 6 days earlier. But it wasn't, so it isn't an NYT bestseller. *shrug*

 

Not to mention all the myriad lists, like the modern Hardcover Fiction vs Combined Print+ebook, or the Children's, Young Adult, etc.
I think now I know why no one had done this before.