[Stoneforger]

It probably has nothing to do with how good his books are (I'm not a fan of the genre), but rather how good he is in marketing. I'm not sure exactly how he did, and I am trying to have some tangible measure of success with my own novel, but unfortunately if you just want to sell it seems there are quite a few ways to exploit the market, possibly at the expense of other writers.

There's the cover, as someone pointed out, the initial boost from fellow authors' reviews, good site linking, tweets, amazon, boards, you name it. I don't know how he did exactly, even though he seems to offer an undetailed account of it, but it kind of reminds me the million pixel page.

Yeah ok, he sold a million pixels (or e-books), but what then? That can't go on forever. And it definetely cannot be repeated, at least not in the same marketing-trick-exploit fashion.

As I said, I haven't read his work but I'm simply saying he definetely seems to be a lot better at marketing than at writing (I even think he implicitly somehow agrees on that himself).

Even the pen name was chosen carefully (the philosopher and the Lost character are still the top google results).

In itself it is a feat, but not a feat of writing.