Brown's Backlist Bright
by Daisy Maryles -- Publishers Weekly, 6/14/2004
Dan Brown's books continue to lead the charts—a remarkable feat considering the longevity of this bestselling franchise. While Doubleday's The Da Vinci Code is marking 63 weeks on the charts (45 of them in the #1 spot), Pocket Books is celebrating his two backlist bestsellers, particularly Angels & Demons, with 60 weeks on the mass market charts (23 of them in first place) and 23 weeks on the fiction hardcover lists. Sales for that title and for Deception Point—40 weeks and counting on PW's mass market list—have been amazing. Before Da Vinci, the Pocket mass market edition of Angels, published in July 2001, had a total of 140,000 copies after two trips to press; after Da Vinci and 28 additional printings, the print figure is a whopping 4,260,000. Angels was published in hardcover in May 2000, with a 25,000 first printing; after Da Vinci and 28 more trips to press, there's a hefty one million in hardcover. For Deception Point: 75,000 mass market copies when it was published in December 2002; after Da Vinci and 25 more trips to press, the figure is 2,325,000. In hardcover, it had 20,000 before Da Vinci and 180,000 after. The publisher did some numbers-crunching from last week's BookScan sales figures for Angels & Demons; the combined hardcover and paperback figure was higher than The Da Vinci Code, and the only book that outsold A&D was Anna Karenina.
