Ryan Winfield????

Judging by the reviews, he hit it out of the ballpark with an amazing read that snowballed. The one 1star is from someone who didn't read the book and rated it for foul language.

The cover looks great and the blurb is enticing.

His website is terrible in the sense it takes forever to load. Flash is the devil for book sites. As a potential buyer, I'm not sticking around to watch it load. If I found him through his website and not here and a search on amazon. He would have lost a sale.

How has he hit it big?

I'd never heard of him before you mentioned it. At Amazon, I'm seeing a single book, in the quarter-million ranking (not a bestseller), with a bunch of reviews (understandable, given his biography; he knows a lot of people). He's got only 2 or 3 reviews on Goodreads. The first three pages of Google (on his name) generates a combination of stuff that he, himself, has posted, and stuff on other people with the same name, nothing from third parties to suggest other people/bloggers/readers are talking about him.

I've never seen his book advertised once.

Amazon customizes the ads for each individual based on your buying and browsing habits. For whatever reason, it thinks this book will appeal to you specifically and so it advertises it very heavily to you. But others won't see the same thing.

JanDarby said:

At Amazon, I'm seeing a single book, in the quarter-million ranking (not a bestseller)

Click to expand...

Weird. I did a search and see it at ~2000 overall and in the top ten of a couple bestseller lists.

The Kindle edition is in the 2,000 range; the paperback book is in the 280,000 range (at the time of this post). I have never heard of him before and have seen no ads for his books on Amazon. As J. Tanner said, Amazon tailors their ads based on what you purchase and what you have searched for in the past.

JanDarby said:

. . . a single book, in the quarter-million ranking . . . .

Click to expand...

Which suggests sales in the low single digits.

--Ken

J Tanner -- thanks for the additional information. I forgot to look at the Kindle format version. He is selling there better than in the paper version I viewed originally, but hardly in any stellar way.

His two highest bestelling categories appear to be lit-fic (which is consistent with the page I read), which isn't a particularly top-selling category generally, and then he's at the bottom of the top 100 of genre romance's "romantic suspense," which is an out-and-out mis-categorization (and it makes me crazy when authors do that; anyone who reads romantic suspense is NOT looking for a story about a guy finding himself through sex, which is what the product description seems to be!).

But, really, I don't think he's any huge hit, and only appeared that way because of some odd trigger in Rhush's past experience with Amazon, possibly aggravated by the book's miscategorization as romantic suspense. Or the author could be buying ads, and I just didn't notice them, b/c I've become pretty blind to advertising online.

This has been interesting, though, and I'm glad Rhush brought it up -- the way certain authors/books can appear to be doing better than they probably are, and you have to do some digging to see the reality, but not everyone will do that digging.

~2k in Kindle rank means 30-40 sales a day, consistently. That's pretty good.

I don't know about paper ranks, but I know that every time my paperback gets a sale, it pops down to about 1.2mil in rank, so I'm betting that 280k isn't that bad.

Edited to add- I've never heard of this guy either though, sorry.

I think some people may have bought the kindle version just so they could look at the cover art on their phone. Sexy erotic fantasy stuff.

And the book description, while it doesn't appeal to me, probably strikes a chord with some.

It's high-priced for kindle, at 9.99. Hmm.

I think he's got some money coming in from other sources to help him advertise. He pops up on facebook, too.

I've read this book, and it's excellent! I gave it a five star review and would recommend it to anyone who's okay with rough material (profanity, sex, drug-taking, you name it). I think the cover's a bit deceiving. Yes, it is from a scene in the book, but it's a serious book, beautifully written, about a young man's climb into and out of hell. See for yourself and download a sample!