The Brown stuff
So, 300,000 copies of The Lost Symbol sold in the first 36 hours since publication. The lesson? Never underestimate the power of aggressive marketing - or the idiocy of the British public.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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2 comments:
300,000? Is that all? Though naturally, I can imagine hearing the alternating sounds of non-Brown affiliated publishers all over the world vomiting into buckets and raging against an unjust world on reading both his baaaad reviews and six/seven-digit stats like that.
The British and World reading public like simply written three-page chapters detailing mystic bulljizzm mixed in with blood-strewn tourist attraction treasure trails of toss that try to make sense of an essentially chaotic existence. In a really stoopid way. Joining the dots in the vicarious fictional manner - via the magic hand of Dan - is perhaps millions of people's only briefly fulfilling recourse to escapism in their otherwise shapeless, meandering lives.
Though I think making DC the new centre of his symbologist hunt bollocks was a schoolboy error. There are so many others he could have tried, just by sticking to the shite he knows. To wit.
The Michelangelo Cipher
The Raphael Key
The Donatello Chain
Of course, he would eventually have run out of Ninja Turtles, but we would all be far more travelled down the path of our lives to care by then, with Brown's own path hopefully ending in a hitherto unseen shear cliff face very soon.
Yep, there's little argument that the public's taste leaves a little to be desired. Still - are they using time they'd spend reading another book to read this, I wonder? I'd imagine, for the most part, not - so actually they're probably choosing Dan Brown over, say, watching TV or reading a crappy magazine. So maybe it's an improvement of sorts.
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