As The Da Vinci Code finishes its second year in hardcover, the publishing curve has finally caught up with it. Readers who made Dan Brown's book an 18-million-copy bestseller will soon find plenty of new thrillers that mix arcane historical detail with a hint of conspiracy theory. Between February and June, at least a dozen new titles will land in stores in an unstoppable flow not seen since Bridget Jones's Diary inspired the phrase "chick lit."
But booksellers—who played a crucial role in generating the extraordinary level of excitement surrounding Brown's book—aren't yet talking with much animation about these new intellectual thrillers, like Adam Fawer's Improbable (Morrow, Feb. 1) or The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman (Penguin Press, Feb. 7). "Until I get more buzz on these books, they're going in as very strongly placed new titles, with a multicopy stack on a table," said Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley. "The early spring months were very full, so there wasn't a place to put these."
If Hensley and other booksellers haven't yet spotted any clear winners, it's not for lack of trying on the part of publishers. Eagerness to anoint the next Dan Brown has led many houses to throw plenty of cash at little-known authors and to print thousands of advance reader's copies as they attempt to replicate Doubleday's publishing strategy, which hinged on a pre-pub blitz involving 11,000 advance reading copies.
Of course, there can be considerable rewards for the right book. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (Dial), published a year after Brown's book, in April 2004, has come closest to picking up Da Vinci's mantle. Though its hardcover sales of about 900,000 copies do not approach Brown's figures, they would surely please any publisher, let alone most first-time authors.
But many booksellers are cautioning that trying to follow Brown's formula isn't the best way to win even a fraction of his sales. "Everyone is trying to make lightning strike twice in the same place," said Daniel Goldin, trade book buyer for the four Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in the Milwaukee area. "We think, 'what's the formula?' but of course a phenomenon always breaks the formula."
High Stakes Acquisitions
In the most expensive attempt yet to fill Dan Brown's shoes, Little, Brown paid $2 million in a heated auction for Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a modern-day Dracula story of a woman who may be descended from vampires, to be published in June. "Given the success of The Da Vinci Code, everybody around town knows how popular the combination of thriller and history can be and what a phenomenon it can become," said v-p, associate publisher Sophie Cottrell, lamenting how quickly the bids went up.
It's not just first-timers who are receiving such benedictions, either. Agent Russell Galen at Scovil Chichak Galen recalled that when he was shopping around James Rollins's seventh science thriller, the forthcoming Map of Bones (Morrow, May), "Nobody mentioned The Da Vinci Code, but it was the unspoken elephant in the room. When I said, 'I want quadruple the advance,' nobody looked at me like I was crazy."
Putting a lot of money on the table can certainly separate a book from the pack. The fanfare surrounding Kostova's deal, along with a 7,000-copy printing of her ARC and an upcoming six-city pre-pub tour, is helping her novel achieve an early measure of visibility among chain and independent booksellers. Foreign sales in 15 countries also give credence to Little, Brown's bet on it. And while B&N and Borders are already talking about aggressive front-of-store positioning, it's still early: most buyers haven't received the galley yet.
Set Up for Failure?
No matter how large the advance or how many galleys are distributed, chains and independents alike called bandwagon publishing and promotions a fool's errand. At the Davis-Kidd store in Jackson, Tenn., fiction team leader Mike Smith does a rotating "If you like this..." display and has matched The Da Vinci Code with titles such as Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer (Atria, 2003; Washington Square Press due April 2005), Lev Grossman's Codex (Harcourt, 2004) and Steve Berry's The Amber Room (Ballantine, 2003). But Smith cautioned that such comparisons often backfire when made to a title that inspires the kind of quasi-religious reverence that The Da Vinci Code does. "The customer is going to be very wary and is going to expose the emperor with no clothes," agreed Barnes & Noble's Hensley.
But Diane Garrett, owner of Diane's Books of Greenwich, Conn., sighed, "Everybody who comes into my store wants another Da Vinci Code. Nobody wants to move on. It's tough on other authors." Then she brightened, adding, "But if you had another story like it, oh, man, would you have money in the bank."
