Values

symbols and codes – and the role they’ll
play in his new book. A short while later,
the publisher sends the modest,
charming Brown to meet with executives
at the headquarters of the biggest
book retailers in the US. He tells them
about his forthcoming thriller, and the
curiosity and enthusiasm grows.
Random House prints and distributes
more than 10,000 advance reader
copies – normally, this number is just
3,000, even for established bestselling
authors. The strategy works. Advance
orders start climbing. Bookseller Barnes
& Noble alone orders 75,000 copies.
That’s already 40,000 copies more than
the initial planned fi rst print run for all
of North America. The enthusiasm
among booksellers is so great, that they
even band together to suggest their own
marketing measures for the book – another
atypical occurrence.
The ad campaign in the New York
Times to mark the launch of “The Da
Vinci Code” thus lands on fertile
ground, which has been amply primed
with expectation. And those expectations
aren’t disappointed. In the fi rst
week, more than 10 percent of the
230,000 copies printed are sold, and
“The Da Vinci Code” stuns the publish-
1 | Doubleday editor Jason Kaufman with bestselling author Dan Brown
2 | The successful duo with Suzanne Herz and editor-in-chief Bill Thomas
3 | The Doubleday marketing team at a meeting in their New York office
1
1 2
The Mona Lisa – a man?
With this surprising advertising
campaign in the New York Times
in March 2003, Random House
launches Dan Brown’s new
thriller, “The Da Vinci Code“
ing world by hitting the New York Times
bestseller list at #1.
While most bestsellers have their
best sales weeks shortly after they’ve
been launched, sales of “The Da Vinci
Code” keep growing, week after week.
In addition to a riveting book, an allencompassing
marketing strategy
plays an important role in this development.
When ABC-TV airs a documenta-
3
ry titled “Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci,” the
publishers ensure that Brown makes a
live appearance on the station’s morning
television program. There, he reveals
that the book jacket on his new
bestseller contains a code. Anyone that
cracks it could win a trip to Paris. During
this week, sales of the book surpass
the previous sales record – at a time
when the book has already been in
stores for 33 weeks.
When Dan Brown’s next book, “The
Lost Symbol” is published in fall 2009,
“The Da Vinci Code” is one of the most
successful books of all time, having sold
more than 80 million copies worldwide
and been translated into more than 50
languages. “We continue to benefi t
enormously from the tremendous editorial
partnership between Dan and Jason
and from the entrepreneurial publishing
campaign Doubleday created
and implemented for ‘The Da Vinci
Code,’” says Markus Dohle, Chairman
and CEO of Random House and
member of the executive board at
Bertelsmann. Just how much the publisher
profi ted can be seen in sales of
“The Lost Symbol”: the new thriller sold
a million copies in its fi rst 24 hours on
the market. That’s a record.
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