A quick lesson why there’s more to a book’s demand than Amazon sales rank.

Here’s are some questions we’re going to answer:

• When is Amazon sales rank lying to you?
• When is Amazon sales rank not a measure of a book’s demand?
• When is there actually more demand that a bad Amazon sales rank indicates?

We are going to talk about how to profit from “reading between the lines” of Amazon sales rank – and reveal books that might actually be higher demand than sales rank indicates….

The story behind the new Keepa-alternative TruRank: Cheaper, simpler, and easier historical Amazon sales rank tool.

Keepa starts charging for sales rank graphs: Here’s how to see them for free.

In this article:

After CamelCamcelCamel meltdown, Keepa puts sales rank charts behind a paywall.
Why seller panic is vastly overblown.
How you can still see Keepa sales rank graphs: Free

What I learned analyzing dozens of DVDs and VHS, on a mission to reverse-engineer sales rank for videos.

• An overview of sales rank for Amazon’s video category.
• The top 10 things to know about sales rank for DVDs and VHS

How to separate the obsolete books from ones that will actually sell on Amazon. Readers of this site know I am a proponent of two closely linked things: The theory that “almost everything sells on Amazon, eventually.” Not being intimidated by Amazon sales rank’s in the 1 million+ range. Being misunderstood (what else is new) […]

How I knew 10 books with terrible Sales Rank’s would still sell. (Get past the boring title and subject matter and there’s a valuable lesson here, so take this bitter pill. You may even enjoy it.) I took a road trip to Iowa recently, and on the return trip I made a few book stops. […]

Sales Rank is among the most misunderstood yet important elements of selling on Amazon. You scan a book. It’s ranked 700,000. How much information can you learn from this number? You can extract more meaning from it than you think… (This post is a condensed adaptation of the Sales Rank module in my extensive video […]

I track the sales rank of a book after a single sale, and am floored by the results. I’ve mentioned before that one of my side businesses is publishing. I have about 10 titles in print, most of which are very “long tail” books that sell steadily but slowly. Cumulatively, they bring me in decent […]

I ship over 100 poorly ranked books to Amazon. Six months later, here are the sales results. In June, I did a post on pulling over 100 books from the university library dumpster. The library was (and still is) in the midst of a massive book purge (to make way for more computers), and I […]

Cynthia Stine does a fantastic website on Fulfillment by Amazon called FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) Step By Step that succeeds where this one fails: Providing in-depth, long-form content that really gets deep into a subject. For a great example of her content, read this recent post on how to work a library book sale. I’m […]