That's interesting, especially when he (Salvatori) said the exact opposite everywhere else. He said at Comic-Con that when he was commissioned to do the book and they told him he had to kill Chewie, that he basically gave the check back to them. Once they had him convinced that it had to be done and that Lucas had blessed it, he told them that he would do it his way. They were fine with that, so we have the heroic death.

The only reason I mention that they wanted to make it more real is, again, because the publishers themselves said that. Again, at Comic-Con, they said Star Wars didn't really have any drama since you always knew the main characters would survive. By killing Chewie, they were telling the readers that no one is safe so anyone can die. That way, if Luke got into some kind of peril, you couldn't automatically assume he'd find a way out because anything was now possible. Hence, making it more real.

I honestly don't remember seeing anywhere which character was killed when Vector Prime first came out. All I heard was that a major character had died. I had to search Google to find out. I'm a slow reader, so I wouldn't have found out until a year later at the least.