The Da Vinci code: a (marketing) triumph

With Harry Potter gone, 2009’s book world is all about Dan Brown and his recently-announced sequel to The Da Vinci Code, which will be released in September under the bafflingly (or rather, calculatedly) bland title The Lost Symbol. As I mentioned recently on this blog, just 500 top authors last year generated around a third of Britain’s £1.8bn book sales—a new record for top-heavy sales—and Brown’s latest may tip the scales still further towards the few, backed by cross-media marketing of a density and penetration only usually encountered in especially prolonged assaults by the US military. But why care? Because more and more eggs are being put into just one or two baskets of this type and, to belabour the metaphor, at some point I suspect one is going to get dropped and there’s going to be the mother of all omelettes (that is, a very rude shock and an utter economic disaster for a very big publishing house).

In May, Angels and Demons—the film sequel to the Da Vinci Code, based on an earlier Brown book—comes out. There’ll be an illustrated movie book to accompany it, of course, together with a new paperback edition of the novel, while Sony—who own the rights to Brown’s protagonist, Robert Langdon—will usher the Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, towards celluloid as fast as they can. If The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, moreover, glossy websites, videogames, mobile phone tie-ins, and spin-off “factual” texts are sure to follow in an effort to wring every last penny from this particular Intellectual Property. It’s not so much a secret code as a finely-honed formula: and its effectiveness is both a matter of faith and one of urgent financial necessity for the modern book trade. On which note it’s worth remembering that The Da Vinci Code itself was a surprise hit from an author who had hitherto enjoyed only modest sales and advances, just like almost all of the mega-hit books of recent years, and that it’s on this fertile class of great unknowns that the written word has always relied for its long-term profits and vigour. Too top-heavy can very easily translate to falling-flat-on-your-face.