'WE HAD about 150 pre-orders," says Steve Reynolds, manager of Waterstone's in Dublin's Jervis Centre. A lot of people have been waiting to get their hands on Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, which was published on Tuesday, writes ANNA CAREY
One million copies of the long-awaited follow-up to his 2003 mega-seller The Da Vinci Codewere sold across the US, UK, Canada and Ireland in the first 24 hours, and made such an impact that Amazon.com's share price jumped by almost 10 per cent on the day of release.
Irish sales have been strong ever since. “It’s pretty huge,” says Martin Edwards of Hughes and Hughes in St Stephen’s Green. “On Tuesday we had people coming literally as soon as we opened just to buy it. It’s been selling constantly ever since.”
Together, the country’s 13 Hughes and Hughes stores have been selling about 500 copies a day. By Thursday, Eason’s in O’Connell Street, Dublin, had sold 188 copies; Dubray Books had sold 500 throughout their eight stores, with Dublin’s Grafton Street and Galway’s Shop Street stores leading the sales; Waterstone’s in Dublin’s Jervis Centre had sold 200 copies, and its Cork branch had sold 300; and Hodges Figgis in Dublin was selling about 56 copies per day. “To put it into context,” says Liam Fitzgerald of Hodges Figgis, “other blockbusters, like James Patterson, sell about a fifth of that when they’re released.”
And supermarket chain Tesco had sold 2,000 copies throughout the 117 of its Irish stores that stock books.
But while Brown and his publishers are making a lot of money, bookshops are not. Until 1997, the UK’s Net Book Agreement allowed British publishers to set the prices at which books were sold. This ensured booksellers couldn’t offer huge discounts.
Legally, the rule only applied to the UK but it tended to be practised in Ireland. However, the abolition of the agreement in 1997 strengthened the big chains, who could afford to offer massive discounts, and brought supermarkets into the bookselling game. Since then, 500 independent bookshops in the UK have closed down, unable to compete.
"The supermarkets work with smaller gross margins," says Kevin Barry of Dubray Books. "They're in the business of low margins and high [sale] volume. A bookshop is the opposite – low volume and high margin. We're not selling a huge amount of books. But if supermarkets can get books like Harry Potterand Dan Brown to sell in big quantities, they can afford to take the low margins."
Supermarkets also get the books at a lower price from the wholesalers. And selling books like cans of beans seems to work, as Tesco’s sales show. “It’s easier than going to a book shop, and you can use your Clubcard,” says a Tesco’s spokesperson.
In order to compete with the supermarkets, bookshops are forced to offer similarly huge discounts. The book’s cover price is £18.99 (roughly €22), but Waterstones is selling the book for around €11.50, Eason’s and Dubray are both selling it for €12.99, Hodges Figgis charges €11.40 and Hughes and Hughes are charging €14.99. Tesco stores, on the other hand, are selling the book for just €11. These low prices mean that the average bookshop is not making a profit on each sale. “But customers expect us to stock it,” says Kevin Barry. “So we can’t let them down.”
For smaller shops, however, stocking a book that’s on sale in big supermarkets for little more than the wholesale price simply doesn’t make sense.
Louisa Cameron of Raven Books, an independent new and second-hand bookshop in Blackrock, has only taken in one copy of The Lost Symbol– for a loyal customer who ordered it in specially – and says she advises customers who really want the book to go to the nearby branch of Dubray. However, she expects she will see more copies in her store soon enough. "I could build a second house with all the second-hand copies of The Da Vinci CodeI get offered," she says.
The book in numbers
1,000,000
Global sales on the first day
6,500,000
initial global print run
17 hours
length of the audio download version of The Lost Symbol
81,000,000
copies of The Da Vinci Codesold to date
Twists, turns and cliff-hangers, but is it any good?
'IF YOU'RE out to describe the truth," Albert Einstein declared, "leave elegance to the tailor." Elegance may be at a premium in Dan Brown's The Lost Symbolbut there is – theoretically – no end to the truth to be uncovered by symbologist Robert Langdon when he gets sucked into an anti-Masonic conspiracy set in Washington, DC.
Called to America’s capital by his good friend and mentor, the high-ranking Mason Peter Solomon, Langdon quickly finds himself in possession of a coded pyramid and pursued by the CIA. Decoded, the pyramid promises knowledge of the Ancient Mysteries that the Masons have for centuries hoarded on behalf of all mankind; but Mal’akh, a sinister, tattooed eunuch, is determined that mankind will never experience true enlightenment.
Unsurprisingly, The Lost Symboloffers many of the features that made The Da Vinci Codea phenomenal bestseller. The story takes place over a few hours; short chapters and teasing cliff-hangers create a propulsive momentum; the twists and turns are drip-fed in the form of information dumps by the polymath Langdon. Word games, secret societies and global conspiracies all figure, with Langdon, by turns hapless and brilliant, something of a flesh-and-blood philosopher's stone who transforms the apparently blind alleys of Washington DC into the shimmering glories of classical Rome.
The prose is clunky, certainly, and Brown has an irritating penchant for italics, while the excessive use of exposition makes a mockery of the dictum, 'Show, don't tell'. The storytelling is preposterously melodramatic, and all but very few of the characters appear to have been borrowed from wherever it is they store the Bond villains who weren't quite villainous, insane or megalomaniac enough to make a worthy adversary for 007. That said, there's no denying that the story is as addictive as the next cigarette. You know it's not good for you, and you'll probably feel bad afterwards, but hey, one more hit won't kill you . . . If the backdrop to The Da Vinci Codewas largely based on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the backbone of The Lost Symbolis Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. Here Brown seeks to blend the mysticism of Far Eastern, Egyptian, classical and early European societies with the latest advances in quantum physics and the 'metaphysical philosophy' of noetics. He invokes a number of eminent scientists – Newton, Spinoza, Bohr – in the process, although none are more name-checked (or misrepresented) than Einstein, who spent the latter part of his career in a fruitless attempt to justify his claim that God does not play dice.
It's an entertaining romp, if you're prepared to ignore some of the more outrageous assertions about the links between, say, the Upanishads and string theory, but there is a crucial difference between
The Lost Symboland
The Da Vinci Code. In the latter, Brown was taking aim at one of the western world's most sacred cows. Here he is bent on rehabilitating the reputation of one of its most tarnished icons, that of America itself. Whether that perverse spirit of anti-iconoclasm is sufficient to drive
The Lost Symbolto sales of 80 million copies remains to be seen.
DECLAN BURKE
Declan Burke is a freelance writer and novelist and is behind the Crime Always Pays website