Has it come to this? Dan Brown the ubiquitous author of The Da Vinci Code and now, the record-breaking The Lost Symbol among other offerings, is being exalted as the saviour of the publishing industry and the champion driver of fledgling e-book sales.
As the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, Random House’s Doubleday imprint said that Brown’s novel Lost Symbol sold more than 2m copies in hardcover and e-book formats in its first full week on sale in the US, Canada and the UK.
Like Da Vinci, The Lost Symbol offers religious intrigue and a cliff-hanger plot. Set in Washington DC, it once again features Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks in the films) but this time, Langdon is probing the secret world of the Freemasons.
Random House, owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann AG, said the book’s performance since its launch represented a one-week sales record for the publisher.
Interestingly, about 5 per cent of the total first week’s sales, or 100,000 or so copies, came from the e-book edition.
Brown’s novel, which has received mixed reviews, is his first since Da Vinci was published in 2003. It has since sold more than 81m copies – yes, that’s 81 MILLION – copies globally.
And by the look of Lost Symbol’s debut week, Brown might be on track to do it again.
Not bad for a week’s work – although it should be noted that Lost Symbol fell short of the sales figures posted by JK Rowling’s Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, which sold more than 8m copies on its first day in the US alone.
Nevertheless, publishers and book retailers are hailing the release of the book as a big success – and Brown for his contribution in halting the steady decline of book sales over the past year.
Sadly, however, the methods being employed to boost Lost Symbol sales are hardly going to help lesser beings in the industry. One glance at Amazon‘s website shows that publishers can afford only with the likes of Brown to apply heavy discounts to all versions of the novel; for example, the UK hardcover edition’s official retail price of 18.99 ($31) is being offered for just £7 ($11.40).
And for a taste of what some of the critics are saying, here’s the first two paragraphs of William Sutcliffe’s review in the FT last weekend:Rarely can the publication of a novel have excited such high and low expectations as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Expectations are high because Brown is a publishing phenomenon. The Da Vinci Code has sold 81m copies worldwide; Brown’s books are the four bestselling adult paperback novels of all time in the UK. Expectations are low because Brown is also famous for prose so leaden it could roof a church.
The Lost Symbol demonstrates no stylistic improvement on its predecessors. It is filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop. Yet complaining about Brown’s prose is a little like reproaching Proust for a lack of car chases. In a Dan Brown novel, plot is everything.
Related links:
Man in the News: Dan Brown – FT
Drawing comfort from conspiracy, Emma Jacobs – FT