On the other hand, I also hear that the only person who's sold more books is God. The man's making Harry Potter money off just one book.

First of all, I know a lot of people who do like Dan Brown. My mom, my dad, an aunt, several in-laws...

My guess is your queries suffer from sample error. Who are you talking to? Scifi and Fantasy lovers? If so, Dan Brown is not up their creek. Writers? I've noticed that writers, even amateurs, pick novels apart for the things they've learned are wrong. I recently reread a book I loved as a teenager and found that I now hatd it for all the info dumps. Strangely, I never really noticed the info dumps the first time. (Although I did skim those parts.)

I did not read the DaVinci Code (too lnog a wait at the library). I read Angels and Demonds and thought it was ok...nothing special. It suffered from some POV violations and an unbelievable, sensationalist plot (which probably made many people love it). On the other hand, I read it from cover to cover in relatively short order, so it must have done something right.

I thought the ending was the weakest part of the book, as I felt a bit unsatisfied and let down, but it wasn't a deal-breaker. I know I could never have written that book, but I think I'm glad somebody wrote it.

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I think a lot of his success had to do with the Catholic church’s reaction to his work. I think that worked for Rushdie too. He never held much appeal to me until the Islamic nations put a price on his head.

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I'm sorry, I can't let that stand.

Ayatollah Khomeini called for the fatwah. In the 90s, the reformist Iranian governemnt distanced itself from his views, although Ayatollah Khameini reaffirmed it.

Your book is a million-seller in the US - that just means there are 299 million people who haven't read it.

It was an efficiently written book. There wasn't too much fat, or art, in it. The protagonists were smart. Some of the protagonists were believers, and the subject matter was duly intriguing. Catholics are cool. They are old. They are secretive. They have dark pasts, lots of rituals, and there are a ton of them.

Friends of mine who've read the book have said that they enjoyed learning the history in the book. They understand that most of the book's so-called "history" is questionable, but the book introduced them to ideas like the Gnostic texts, the templars, the history of cyphers, and the controversy about Mary Magdelene. I think that before the Code most people only knew of the templar knights from the last Indiana Jones movie. I don't hink that most people buy the conclusions Brown makes, but the evidence presented is interesting enough on its own.

Dan Brown is a whore. Anyone can get published if they take his path, and sometimes the money and fame is pretty tempting. Until you realise what it is you've made yourself famous as. If that's your goal, then go to it.

Honestly, I wouldn't even mind if only the book weren't such a piece of crap. It's not like I'm averse to a little Catholic bashing, or think that Christ couldn't have been married (he might even have been married to MM, though she almost certainly ouldn't have been his first wife) and had kids (I'm reasonably sure he did have kids, actually, and therefore should have been married). The assertion that Christ wasn't divine sort of reduces the whole story to pointlessness, but Dan Brown wouldn't be the first or most prominent person to suggest it.

Write something controversial with just enough plausible fact to be believable to people with an 8th grade education (The average American). Make sure that the people you will upset the most are powerful, populous, and that they find out about the book just before it is published. (Send them a few dozen advance copies, claiming to be a concerned man on the inside)

Oh and suppress all the evidence that the facts you used were disproved two decades earlier until just before they put the movie out.

I think, like the rest of us, he writes the stories he's given, and does his best with them.

I didn't want to read it because I find the demonization of Opus Dei to be offensive, but that's neither here nor there for success.

But even as I was horrified by its awfulness and inanity, I couldn't put it down, and read the whole thing on a quick plane flight to Seattle.

Partly I think it's the cliffhangers and the pacing; partly it's subject matter that interests me and that I've spent a lot of time studying in the past in various contexts.

Last time I read it, I counted a grand total of two chapters in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where the ending didn't make me hungry for what came next. (One of them could have been fixed by changing the title of the next chapter.)

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I couldn't put it down, . . . Partly I think it's the cliffhangers and the pacing;

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Those are the same reasons why I couldn't finish it. I read over sixty chapters, but I paused and discovered there were forty more that I had to wade through. So out of morbid curiosity, I read the last couple of chapters to see how it ended and didn't feel like I'd missed anything in between.

I don't and never have cared about the controversy in the story. I think it's ridiculous that there have been at least five books written concerning the Code, and I feel that the people who first took offense at the novel have made it more popular than it would have been if they'd just kept quiet. I was bored out of my mind rather than conflicted when I read it.

Of course, reasonable people these days don't believe a word of that nonsense.

As a reader, I hated the cliffhangers when the next chapter jumped to a different character (I found Silas to be very boring, and I did not care at all about Bishop Ring-Around-the-Roses).

As a writer, I thought he used too many flashbacks, but I felt that he at least didn't tend to stop the action for them. He seemed to be only putting them in when the characters were travelling from one place to another (which they did a lot--makes me think there could be a board game based on the book in which the players have to race all over a map of Paris).

His characters are shallow, but I figured this may be a characteristic of the mystery thriller. I realized this is an idea book, and not a character driven book. I also felt the characters made some illogical choices that were artificially inflating the sense of the mystery.

As for the basic concept... I had heard it postulated before even though I had never read "Holy Blood Holy Grail," which is why I thought their lawsuit was so ludicrous. For some people, finding out more about the theory of Jesus having a family was an element of being a "page turner."

But when writers start looking to them for instruction on how to write, I get a little antsy. Sorry if I sound like a bit of a...okay, I'll just say it.

"he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly, smart @$$!"

I'm not sure, but I think "The Da Vinci Code" started selling in sizeable numbers before the Catholic Church raised [valid] objections to it---or at least before they objected with the oomph! of recent months.

Brown's story reminds me of Mario Puzo. He, too, had published a couple of books before one massive bestseller. I gather an editor mentioned a minor character, a mobster, in one of those early books, and said a book about the Mob might sell better. Puzo then sat down and researched and wrote a book, "The Godfather," intended to sell better than his other books.

Dan Brown did a number of things right though. The biggest was the promotion and contraversy. If you want to see a text book case of marketing, follow the promotion of DVC. Dan Brown's writing is migraine inducing to me, but his marketing of his work is masterful.
DVC is a quick paced thriller that clearly delineates the bad guys from the good guys.
The puzzles were all in english. Good to have your target audience able to understand.
It is a very visual novel, but did not use a lot of description. Everyone has an idea of what the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper look like.
It rode the media coat tails of the whole Catholic Pedophile Priest cover-up scandal. A deep distrust for the Church of Rome in the psyche of the reading populace made a book describing a millenial cover up seem plausible.
Last of all, it became great coffee break conversation. People who were not avid readers would pick it up and read. The books simple driving plot made it very accessible. You can skim a lot and still follow along.

I remember years ago, back in like 2000...and this is no lie, tho I can't prove it...I was kicking around the idea of writing a contemporary literary fictional work called Miriam and Yehoshua, focusing on the relationship between...you guessed it. I was fascinated by their story (I had just before this read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and loved the idea...I was raised Catholic and I had a certain, well, beef I guess you could say with the Church)...I was going to make Miriam *very* liberal, an inheritor of her father's winery (didn't know if this was possible in 31 AD Judea, I was just wingin' it), and she's free to pursue whatever...she's misidentified as a prostitute since she hangs out with them; the harlots at this particular harem she frequents give her all kinds of advice on how to prevent pregnancy, what kiosk in downtown Jerusalem sells the best twine sandals, and just discuss men in general and how baffligly idiotic they are. Miriam has an affair with a Roman centurion, for a bit of a selfish reason...she loves horses, and she gets free rides with the centurion (didn't know if the Romans had horses, I'd have to research that), but one day she decides to ride away wildly through town, exhalting in her equestrian freedom and verve, and he is angered, trying to assert his alpha-male-hood, which alienates her, and their relationship goes down from there.

Number 10 on that forbes celebrity list thingy:
PAY 88 MILLION!!! -(although it doesn't say specifically for last year, this year so far, or total... but it's definately not total, b/c j.k. rowling was listed as having 75 million, and of course she has more money total... i dunno. If someone does know, post it... but O MAN THATS SO MUCH MONEY FOR THAT BASTARD!!!

"The critically lambasted film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code" grossed $77 million domestically on its opening weekend, the second-best opening ever for an adult-oriented film. (It's well on its way to surpassing "The Passion of the Christ" in worldwide box office receipts.) Brown, whose novel has to date sold 61 million copies worldwide, recently won a plagiarism lawsuit brought against him in England. "The Da Vinci Code" supposes a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and speculates on the fate of their offspring. According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, Sony is planning to bring Brown's earlier work, "Angels & Demons," to the big screen."

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/53/T5P9.html

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And on the Rushdie thing, you forget that Cat Stevens supported the fatwa.

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I didn't know he had (maybe that's why the commercial flight he was on, a year or two back, was turned away from US airspace?), but I know that thousands, if not millions, of ordinary muslims supported it.

And tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, gave no sign whatsoever that they approved. Rushdie is, after all, still alive, and I know of no documented case of anyone actually plotting or atempting to kill him, though I stand to be corrected on that.

I should point out I am not condoning the fatwah in any way; I think words, no matter how offensive or hateful they may be deemed, should be countered with words, not with violence. I just felt the broad-brush sweep, implying the fatwah was the subject of universal support and approval among muslims, to be unhelpful (in my opinion).

1. He sat down at a computer or typewriter

2. He wrote a story

3. He submitted it to a publisher, who then bought it, luckily for Dan Brown, who got to option it for movie rights, too

4. He is likely repeating steps 1 and 2 at the very least

Which is all anyone needs to do right, I figure.

Yeah, the writing was fairly simple-minded and dull, certainly wouldn't win any supertastic literary awards for fantabulous prose and such, but somehow, nevertheless, the story was incredibly engaging.

All this talk in the media and elsewhere about controversy astounds me, with priests threatening this and that and what not -- too funny. What's so controversial about fiction in the first place? It's fiction, make-believe, not real. It's entertainment first and foremost. Was it because the beginning of the book lays claim to certain things as fact that some people believe that Dan Brown claims the entire work as fact? Or is it because of late Christian beliefs are being bashed around by just about anyone in the public spotlight?

I mean, if The DaVinci Code is controversial, what about a plurality of SF books in which Christianity (or any religion, really) fares much worse? Are all Fantasy stories and novels with polytheistic themes essentially written by the hand of the devil since they create false idols? What do you think? Do the majority of people who read fiction truly believe in what an author has written as incontrovertible fact in the real world? I doubt it. There are, I concede, probably more than a few morons out there who do believe...

Well. It must conspiratorial marketing genius that made The DaVinci Code so controversial, notwithstanding that just about no one read the aformentioned book which already developed the Jesus/MM thing long before Dan Brown got any inspiration from it.

Now, if you want REAL controversial Jesus-bashing, then have a gander at some high-level "church" materials presented as fact written by the late L. Ron Hubbard (you'll have to search for these yourselves, of course). From SF hack to savior of the universe, he went, if you're to believe it.

But I finally decided to give it a whirl, figuring that at the very least, Dan Brown must be some kind of evil genius to make so much money off of one novel.

Yes, the sentences were terrifying. The obvious foreshadowing was insulting to anybody's intelligence. The whole premise was pretty ridiculous, and moreso because of the way everybody and their uncle thinks it's about a real conspiracy.

BUT I COULDN'T STOP READING IT! I tried and tried to put it down, but I couldn't.

All I can think is that he's just a master of pacing. In spite of the novel's many flaws, it was exciting and fun to read because it moved so quickly.

I've never read a novel of that size in as short a time, I can say that. But I've never returned to read it again, either.

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Oh, and as for Dan Brown; he has achieved the magic goal. he sells to people who don't buy books.

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That, too - however he did it, he managed to corner that elusive niche market of people who don't usually read a lot.

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Honestly, I wouldn't even mind if only the book weren't such a piece of crap. It's not like I'm averse to a little Catholic bashing, or think that Christ couldn't have been married (he might even have been married to MM, though she almost certainly ouldn't have been his first wife) and had kids (I'm reasonably sure he did have kids, actually, and therefore should have been married). The assertion that Christ wasn't divine sort of reduces the whole story to pointlessness, but Dan Brown wouldn't be the first or most prominent person to suggest it.

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Plus, the whole Priory of Sion thing and the Merovingians being descended from Christ were both hoaxes...admitted by the hoaxers.

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2004/12/29/da_vinci_code/index_np.html?pn=1