Reading tea leaves in the bottom of the cup

I know that many, many authors check the Amazon rankings of their books at least once a day. Believe me, I understand. Because, excepting royalty statements, most authors find it almost impossible to get on-the-ground information about sales. Since Aqueduct Press opened an account with Amazon back in 2004, I've been able to check the sales-- daily-- of all the books we have on Amazon. And I soon discovered a disparity between sales ranking and actual sales. To give you an example (though not using the titles of the books involved), today I noticed that three books had sales rankings in the 800,000s. One of these was a title that had sold 15 copies in the first ten days of August, another one that had sold 3 copies in the first ten days of August, and the third a title that had sold all of 1 copy during that same period.

I'm just saying.