'Da Vinci Code' Drives Sales of Related Titles
by Charlotte Abbott -- Publishers Weekly, 5/26/2003
When Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code
knocked John Grisham's King of Torts out of the top spot on the New
York Times bestseller list in March, it demonstrated that a hardcover novel
by a little-known author can capture a wide audience in a weak economy. Now,
publishers and booksellers are finding another reason to like the book: it has
steadily been driving sales of other titles that expand on its artistic,
historical and religious themes.
At Barnes & Noble, where The Da Vinci Code attracted an enthusiastic following among store managers, many early readers found that the thriller's elaborate plot sparked their curiosity about Leonardo Da Vinci, ancient geometric principles and the Holy Grail. So the chain stacked The Da Vinci Code on its front-of-store impulse table, surrounded by related nonfiction and fiction titles for the month of April.
Sales on most of the featured titles "went up by about 60%," said fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley. The top two performers were How to Think Like Leonardo by Michael Gelb (Dell, 2000; trade paper, $15.95) and The Golden Ratio: The Story of Pi, The World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio (Broadway, 2002; hardcover, $24.95), she said. However, religious titles didn't "pop" as much as expected.
The display also brought two works of backlist fiction "back from the dead," as Hensley put it. A novel about Mary Magdalene, Moon Under Her Feet by Clysta Kinstler (Harper San Francisco, 1991; trade paper, $14.95), had a "very good" sale, she said, though it "did nothing" when it was originally published. The Eight , a classic chess novel by Katherine Neville (Ballantine, 1994; mass market, $7.99), also performed well.
Though the Borders Group didn't dedicate a display to Da Vinci tie-ins, publicity director Ann Binkley noted that sales have more than doubled for Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh (Dell, 1983; mass market, $7.99) since Da Vinci's mid-March laydown.
