Salt Lake City ? For nearly 10 years, the Web site run by a man who goes by the name “Maddox” has amused and irritated thousands with a no-holds-barred brand of satire, leaving nothing sacred or safe.

The scathing commentary is so popular that Maddox’s first venture into books is a best-seller before it has even been published.

“The Alphabet of Manliness” soared to No. 1 on Internet retailer Amazon.com’s list of top sellers on March 28 and remained there for a few days. Three weeks later, it remains the top book on pre-order on the site, said Brad Parsons, a senior books editor at Amazon.com. The book comes out June 6.

Then again, almost nothing about the book could be described as traditional. The content is a sort of dictionary of male bravado – “F” is for Female Wrestling, “N” is for Chuck Norris.

Maddox didn’t spend years trying to shop his book to a publisher. Instead, a publisher approached him based on the popularity of his Web site. It’s a model that’s seen in several books this year, such as “Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book,” by Robert Hamburger (pseudonym).

“I wasn’t going to play those games where I send in letters and I get a rejection letter,” said Maddox, 28, whose real name is George Ouzounian. “I have a fan base. I have people who are reading my material.”

And a loyal fan base at that. With just one e-mail from Maddox to fans who had agreed to be contacted, the book took Amazon’s top spot.

“It had a meteoric rise right to the top. What’s unprecedented is that it stayed there for several days,” Parsons said.

Amazon.com often sees such blasts. A mention by talk queen Oprah Winfrey can send a book to the top of the site’s list, Parsons said. But they usually don’t linger there very long, and the fact that “The Alphabet of Manliness” is a debut book by an unknown author made it all the more unusual, he said.

Maddox, who sometimes uses a cartoon pirate to illustrate himself on his site, estimates there have been more that 7,200 pre-sold copies of the book.

George Ouzounian, also known as Maddox on the Internet, poses at his desk in his small apartment where he runs his Web site and wrote his book The

For a guy who runs a manly man’s Web site, he’s just what you’d imagine him to be in person: T-shirt, jeans and a physique shaped by spending hours in front of a computer or playing video games. He talks about how disappointingly unmanly his hands are, as compared to his father’s, which he says are calloused from hard work – “they’re real man’s hands.” And he takes pride in his ability to grow facial hair at what he believes is the manliest of rates – for Maddox it’s an 8:05 a.m. shadow.

Maddox created a personal Web page – humbly named “The Best Page In The Universe” – to post his humor and opinions, in 1997.

“I created it to kind of spite my close friends and family members,” he said. “At first, I received an entirely positive response – for the first two years, no hate mail. When I got my first hate mail, I was so stoked.”

As his popularity grew, “The Don and Mike Show,” a syndicated radio show based in Washington, D.C., asked him to produce an original satire. Maddox created a piece in 2002 called “I am better than your kids,” where he harshly criticized children’s art work. The hits on his Web site went from 200 to 2,000 the day after the program aired and grew from there.

His postings circulate on the Internet through word of text. One person discovers the site and forwards a link to others with a brief message like, “this is so funny,” or “check this guy out.”

According to Maddox, between 110,000 and 150,000 people visit his site each day. Of those, about 25 percent are first-time viewers.

He doesn’t have advertising or annoying blinking banners on his site, and says he loses revenue because of it. He pays between $600-$700 a month to keep the site’s bandwidth. He quit his job as a programmer for a telemarketing company in 2004 and has been living off the money he makes from the sales of T-shirts and stickers from the site.

“I’m making enough to stay above water,” he said. “Money is not my motivation.”