Nook Bestseller List has some new rules

So I noticed something odd today.  Yes, I'm going to share.

A few days ago I tweeted that only one book promoted in the Sunshine Deals program on Kindle had cracked the Nook top-100 (Prince of Tides).  I found it slightly odd, but nothing more than that.  Then 'My Horizontal Life' joined it.  All well.  But then I saw something I don't usually see.

'My Horizontal Life' went from rank 1 to rank 127 in a single day.  Possible, but very unusual.  And the 'Prince' was nowhere to be found either.  So I did a little looking and noticed this odd distribution:

# of titles below $3 - ranks 1 - 125: 0
# of titles below $3 - ranks 126 - 200: 65

That means not a single sub-$3 in the top 125 slots, but 65 of the next 75 titles were below $3.

Now some people have called me into question for drawing conclusions from limited data sets so I'm just going to leave that one on the table and step back.

I'm sure B&N isn't the only retailer that has rules to 'manage' their bestseller list, and I completely understand the desire to curate the list to provide the most perceived value to their customers.  I'm just calling what I see.