Jane Love, buyer of books in the religion category for Barnes & Noble, calls the mega best seller a “crossover,” meaning the book isn’t being bought by just evangelical Christians.

Colton Burpo is having a late lunch at a T.G.I. Friday‘s in Manhattan. He orders a Mountain Dew, then shares some baby back ribs with his dad, munching on the french fries, passing on the cole slaw.

But before the ribs are gone, he puts his hand in the air. “Miss! Oh, Miss!” he says, flagging down a passing waitress. “I’d like some dessert.”

He orders something called Oreo Madness. When it arrives, it is devoured in less than a minute.

Heaven for any 11-year-old boy. Well, almost heaven. Colton knows the difference. He says he has already been to the real one.

Colton is famous for being the boy who had a near-death experience when he was 4 years old during emergency surgery for a burst appendix. Doctors offered little hope he would survive.

Not only did he live, he says he went to heaven during the operation, met Jesus, John the Baptist, his great-grandfather and a sister he didn’t even know he had (she was miscarried before he was born), then came back to tell his folks about the trip.

A book about Colton’s journey —Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (Thomas Nelson, $16.99) — is such a phenomenon that its Nashville publisher says it has broken all sales records for the company. For the past three weeks, it has been No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. Today it drops to No. 2, behind Water for Elephants…

“So far, the book shows no signs of slowing down. It’s a true phenomenon,” says Matt Baugher, vice president and publisher of Thomas Nelson, which specializes in Christian books and Bibles.

“We now have 3.4 million books in print, and that doesn’t include the popular e-book version. This little book of hope and comfort is being bought in bulk by people all over the world.”

Heaven, released in November as a paperback original with a first printing of 40,000 copies, was written by Colton’s father, the Rev. Todd Burpo, who has a small evangelical congregation in Imperial, Neb. It was co-written by Lynn Vincent, who collaborated with Sarah Palin on the best seller Going Rogue.

Jane Love, buyer of books in the religion category for Barnes & Noble, calls the mega best seller a “crossover,” meaning the book isn’t being bought by just evangelical Christians.

“I don’t know what percentage of the readers are Christian vs. the merely curious, but it has crossed over enough that it’s No. 1, so there are lots of people buying it,” she says.

Stories about people going to heaven and reporting on the trip are surprisingly common —Ninety-Minutes in Heaven, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, The Five People You Meet in Heaven — but Love believes the Burpo book is different.

“This one is very specific, in a voice people can relate to, from a child’s point of view. From the mouth of babes, as they say,” she says. “People buy it, believe it, and talk to their children about it.”

Too many coincidences?

Three things convinced the Burpos their son had gone to heaven: his knowledge of where they were when he was being operated on, his claim that he met a sister he never knew even existed, and his declaration that he met his great-grandfather, a man he never knew but could readily identify later from photographs of the man at a young age…

Blogs, not surprisingly, are alive with doubting Thomases.

Read More:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-04-21-burpo21_CV_N.htm