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Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown Web site Author of the Davinci Code
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DanBrwon.com

Oh, to be Dan Brown of Exeter, New Hampshire in the year 2004! He currently has four novels on The New York Times Bestseller List. His runaway thriller "The Da Vinci Code" has sold 6.5 million copies to date.

 


Visit Dan Brown's web site

According to Movies.com, Ron Howard is directing the film version and, it may star Russell Crowe. Now with a fast-paced promotional campaign out of the way, the author is again traveling the world researching his next book which ravenous fans will unquestionably turn into more gold.

You could tell things were going well for Dan the minute the book appeared. His name has gotten bigger on the cover of each successive book. Dan Brown’s publishers at Doubleday were so happy with "The Da Vinci Code" that they gave it the full-tilt promotion publishers usually reserved for heavyweights like John Grishamn, Danielle Steele and Stephen King. It worked, and Dan Brown is a welterweight no more.

Because the novel whirls around secret symbols and encrypted clues, somebody had the bright idea to embed a number of coded messages into the book’s dust cover. Interviewed on the Today Show, Dan revealed the existence of the hidden messages and promised the winner a free trip to Paris where much of the story takes place. Zillions of people bought the book and entered the contest. Fully 40,000 readers found the encoded messages and a winner was picked at random. Brian Shea, who got the free trip, then proposed to his fiancé on live television in front of a giant copy of the book cover.

To win the prize, readers were invited to visit a promotional web page at TheDaVinciCode.com. You can still go there and listen to the spooky music and crack the code. It was, in retrospect, a stroke of marketing genius, adding to the fervor for a book already breaking sales records on its own merit. People are fascinated by the language of codes and images, the author says. From the Nike "swoosh" to the Nazi swastika, logos and symbols carry great power. We are all, essentially, amateur cryptologists, decoding the world we live in.

"We live in a world of symbols," Dan Brown recently told the Voice of America during a radio interview. "Especially when you look at the Internet."

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

Dan Brown has his own web site too. The homepage features a smiling stand-up shot of the author below a banner headline that reads, "The Official Website of #1 National Bestselling Author". That is not a conceit. Steele, King, Grisham all do the same to distinguish themselves from tribute sites created by overzealous fans, something Dan Brown will have to get used to. One writer has already accused him of cribbing the plot to The Da Vinci Code, another typical downside to explosive success.

The site is a great way to dangle your feet in the rising tide of Dan Brown. There’s stuff on his earlier books and the page design shifts to fit the cover art of the earlier novels, all of which are selling again in the wake of the da Vinci phenomenon which will soon crack a full year at the top of the NY Times list.

The "Meet Dan" section includes a glowing biography and a lengthy FAQ section. But thanks to the success of the novel, the author is able to let the media do most of the selling. You can watch streaming video and audio clips of the author’s appearances on The Today Show, National Public Radio, Good Morning America, New York Book Country and Chronicle. The site designers, Anchorball Web Design  were careful to include a great variety of streaming media tools so the clips are accessible to all types of viewers.

Anchorball also produces a site for bestselling romance author Karen Marie Moning that is nearly identical to the Dan Brown design. That’s not a bad thing because the layout works. The pages are bold and the emphasis is on the author and the books with no extraneous stuff.

Anchorball used to be in Seacoast, New Hampshire and created sites for photographer Nancy Horton and the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League. Last month they moved to Las Vegas. I’ve been watching their stuff since they opened in 1999 and I can’t remember seeing any web design firm improve so rapidly from a standing start.

I tried to pry some Dan Brown secrets out of the team at Anchorball, but they were just too darned professional to comply. The author has a "Contact" button on the web site, but it is essentially a polite "Go Away" button that simply loops the reader back into the site. People who want to contact the author are advised to talk to the publicity department at Doubleday Publishing. Beyond the fame and the millions of dollars, I can’t imagine anything more desirable that a "Go Away" button on my site. The rest of us can only dream.

THE UP SHOT

Don’t tell me the ending. I do not own the book. I want to be the only person in America who walks into the movie version cold. I already know that it involves secret symbolism hidden in paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. There are theories about Jesus and Mary Magdalen, the secret Knight’s Templar group, maps of the Louvre, a search for the Holy Grail, something about the Vatican. You can’t sit in a coffee shop anywhere without knowing that much.

The history behind the mystery has conjured up plenty of controversy, exactly, it appears, as Dan Brown intended – only moreso. Because the novel is based on little known facts about the strange life of the amazing da Vinci and research into alternative biblical gospels, some readers are having a hard time telling fact from fiction. Brown teases that desire on the web site by offering a "Secrets" section that takes readers behind the novel into his research. He has even provided a bibliography for those compelled to learn more about the historic theories in the novel.

It isn’t the first time the author has taken readers down this path. The web site reveals key secrets behind three of his earlier novels. "Angels & Demons" for example, dallies with the cult of astronomer Galileo, the ancient eye-in-the-pyramid symbol on our own dollar bill and the weighty topic of antimatter. The formula that the author devised a decade ago is as clear as the nose on your face, and it works. The public has caught on.

Dan Brown never fails to mention in interviews that his father was a Phillips Exeter math teacher and his mother Is an expert in sacred music. The author took a shot at being a composer and a teacher, but the pieces came together best when he began taking on ancient mysteries. His protagonist, not unlike Harrison Ford in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", is a Harvard "symbologist" who gets to unravel the mystery just inches ahead of the reader. It’s a lot of work. Brown says it takes a year or more of research for every year of writing. Among writers he is becoming known for his habit of starting work at 4 a.m., timing his 90-minute writing blocks with an ancient hourglass and hanging upside down in gravity boots to reinvigorate his gray matter. All of it makes good theater and good theater sells books.

I cannot tell you yet if "The Da Vinci Code" is great literature. I can tell you that it is great thinking. Brown constantly receives kudos for his research and his jigsaw juxtaposition of tantalizing topics. His web site is both revealing, taunting, personal and aloof, just the right mix to serve millions of fans with the least writing time wasted.

Despite effective use of the Web, Brown says it has not been the key source of his research. Appearing on "The Front Porch" at New Hampshire Public Radio just as "The Da Vinci Code" was taking flight last year, host John Walters asked if the Internet was his favorite tool.

"You know it really isn’t," Brown said, "because so much of what is on the Internet is not accurate and it’s silly. It’s almost harder to sort through the enormous amount of strangeness to find the actual true bits. It is much easier to go to Paris and track down some people at the Louvre who know a lot about da Vinci and talk to them."

Aspiring novelists take note – don’t go online, go to Paris. I expect to see Dan Brown’s Paris myself, at the local multiplex, as soon as "The Da Vinci Code" movie comes out.

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