Question: Amazon sales rank seems to be a big concern of booksellers but doesn't have much bearing on my sales and profits. How important is it?

Answer: You're right, Amazon sales rank is not the primary factor in whether a book is good inventory for a used bookseller -- in most cases. The most important consideration is, what is the going price on Amazon, and am I getting it at a bargain price? Even if the book sells only one copy a year (and the sales rank exceeds, say, 500,000) you still have a good chance of selling at a profit.

However, sales rank would be an important consideration if you were buying a certain title in quantity. For example, a couple of years ago, I came across a listing on eBay of a bulk sale of about 500 copies of a book about stock market investing. Five hundred copies of the same book, all in their original factory cartons. The books were about 20 years old and they had been misplaced in a warehouse, and whoever found them put all of them on sale on eBay. The auction winner had to buy the whole lot, and there was a reserve price of a couple thousand dollars. I thought it was a quality book, and the going price on Amazon for the book was about $25. But because the Amazon sales rank was so poor (worse than 200,000) I knew it would take way too long to break even.

With such a poor sales rank, I knew it would have taken a couple of years to sell most of the books, and I didn't think it was worth the risk. If I had come across one copy of the book at a library sale, I would have bought it without hesitation, but I didn't want to invest that much money in a single title -- because I knew from the Amazon sales rank that it was a slow seller.

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Steve Weber is author of "The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site" (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com