The enchanted life of Dan Brown

[Mamatas]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

Quote Originally Posted by Mamatas Those millions of readers, the ones who read Rowling, Stephen King (of whom I read just one short story in my entire life), Brown, Coelho, etc, etc, think that they are reading good literature. Let them think that way. Why not? Some do, sure. Others also are eager to read these books because they're looking for something light or breezy or that is very much not good literature. Some people like trash for trash's sake. (Me too! Though I keep my trash consumption to the TV. Life's too short to read junk books.) Quote There are plenty of examples in literature read by few people and being excellent works of art, at least, for me. Indeed! I was wondering what these 40 million people think when they read Brown's novels. My friend, yesterday, partially answered my question.

Forty million people don't all think the same thing. Some just think, "Well, everyone else is reading it, let me see what the fuss is." Some think, "Wow, he's the best!" Others don't finish the book, or don't even start it, or bought it for a gift, or left it on an airplane after they were done...

[Karnos]

The moment I get my planed collection of short stories out of the door and published (if that ever happens, granted) I'm going to try my luck and write the next "young wizard/vampire" anthology of books and whore my name for profit.

It ought to work, right?

[Russell Nash]

Borges, inoxidable: vende en Argentina 20 mil libros por ao (in Spanish) published 20 years after he died.

What it says, in Argentina, the country where Borges is supposed to be read, "Borges only sells 20,000 copies per year, more than the books by Cortazar, and Sábato (another two great Argentine writers)". "Ficciones" and "El Aleph" sell 5,000 and 7,000 copies per year. I understand than the rest of the copies, 6,000, is what the rest of the books by Borges (together) sell per year. "Most of them are bought by tourists, the hardcover edition costs 90 pesos each one of the 4 volumes ($ 23.50 US dollars), and a softcover edition but new only 30 pesos each ( $ 7.80)." Of course, these books also sell worldwide, but again the article points out that Borges is not Rowling, nor Brown. Sad, but it is true.

Of those 20,000 copies I could say that I was "forced" to buy a book by Borges in high school. My estimate is that if one deducts the used copies bought in used bookstores, added to the copies bought by high school readers, and tourists, Borges is probably not even bought anymore today, and in Argentina. Sad, again, but true.

In Argentina, also, first edition books are mostly softcover copies. And many important writers have a print run of only 5,000 to 10,000 copies. I was always amazed at how many copies a writer needs to sell in Argentina to become bestseller, which I would guess is 10,000, compared to a million copies that an American writer has to sell, like Stephen King's books.

LOS LIBROS MAS VENDIDOS DEL AÑO

The top 10 books sold in Argentina by one of the most respectable bookstores. Number 2: "The Da Vinci Code". Number 3: "Angels and Demons". However, the first one was by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I still see some hope.

[qcrisp]

Scientific evidence that Western Civilisation has descended into unpardonable vulgarity:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/98080

[Russell Nash]

[h2] Unravelling the secrets of a marketing bestseller[/h2]

Simon Houpt
From Friday's Globe and Mail

Unravelling the secrets of a marketing bestseller - The Globe and Mail

"The company immediately began offering it for pre-sale on its website and in stores, and planning a pop-up store in Toronto's Union Station for the book's first on-sale date last week. At that event, more than 100 staff members appeared at the transit hub for a “read in,” making it seem to commuters as if the book was so gripping that people had literally stopped on their way to work to read instead. Indigo claims it sold more copies of the book at Union Station than at its flagship store, though it declined to release sales figures."

"When the Canadian publisher sent out simple games and puzzles, retailers posted them immediately to their websites."

"The weekly magazine Parade signed on to run an excerpt two days before the book's publication, grabbing a potential 73 million readers around the world."

"The sole step into glamour in Canada came in the form of a full-page colour ad the publisher took out in The Globe and Mail's front news section on the day before the book's publication. “The readers were not traditional book buyers,” noted Frances Bedford, a publicist with Random House Canada, “so we did advertising off the book pages.”"

[Russell Nash]

From “The Failure” (Un Uomo Finito), by Giovanni Papini
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924
Chapter 40: The Clown (pages 266-270)

Rather than die of hunger and cold like an alley cat, I will take up any trade. I will pick rags in the streets with a pack on my back. I will stand in front of churches and restaurants begging pennies in the name of God. I will be a cleaner in a public latrine. I will lead a dancing bear through country towns. If, really, I can find nothing else to do I will become a lawyer.

But there is one trade I will never follow—no, not even if I am ordered to; with a revolver at my back. I will never be a literary buffoon. I will never be a "clown author". I will never be the man who writes to amuse people, to pass time pleasantly for the bored and the lazy. I will never be a contemptible wretch who from January 1st to January 1st invents stories, manufactures plots, thinks up adventures, rehashes his­tories, works out novels, writes short stories, rigs up plays to make people who pay and applaud him laugh or cry.

These public mountebanks may prate of beauty, pre­tend to turn up their noses at the public, hide in their vest pockets the money they get for the fun they provide. It does them no good. They may like it or lump it; but they are prostitutes serving the Sov­ereign Mob that would forget its shameless day in an evening of pleasure. They are the hired clowns of the People; jesters and fools to drummers and salesmen who would snuff a book between puffs of cigar smoke. A peddler of fiction is a bootblack of the idle rich He is a panderer offering the sham life of others to people who have no life of their own. What is the difference, in effect, between a cigar and a story, a drama and a bottle of wine? Smoking and reading you pass time more easily. A play, like a good drunk, takes you off into another world where you see things and dream things that do not exist.

There is, to be sure, one difference: Art. You can, I grant you, say many beautiful things this way, and there are books of this kind that may live long in the hearts of men. But underlying them all is the notion that men, above everything else, must be amused and made to laugh—that a good story will keep them awake, and quicken their breathing, till you can reach their minds with a good idea and fool them into swallowing a great truth.

Why should I care whether they are amused or not? I refuse to play buffoon to any one! I assert that all writers of novels and stories and plays have been buf­foons, paid to tickle the imaginations of men, as fid­dlers tickle their ears and women the rest of them.

Most men are children, even at sixty, and they need these time-killers; they need fiction and adventure; even though not quite children themselves have been ready to fill, getting down on all fours on the floor, blowing a tin horn, and straddling a broom-stick. I am sorry to say that among them have been men I admire considerably: Homer and Cervantes, Shake­speare and Dostoievski. They, like other buffoons, have asked: "What can I do for you to-day?" When I read them myself and enjoy them, I too am a cap­tious child always eager to hear a story from mama!

I realize that I am hard to please—a bore and a Puritan. These men have brightened our childhood. Their people have walked with us and talked to us on many an evening of sadness and lust in our boy­hood years. Who would have believed that they were just buffoons? Even I, when not obsessed with wrath that makes me vomit upon them, doubt my own words and almost believe I must be out of my mind, unjust, unkind.

But no, I am right. What is a clown? A clown is a man who amuses men. And how does he amuse them? Often by making them laugh at the misery of others; but at any rate, by using their unhappiness and their misfortunes as a means of arousing not compassion and horror, but mere curiosity. The sad case of two lovers who die before marrying is sure to keep off ten yawns an hour. The desperation of a mother, the infidelity of a wife, the vengefulness of a murderer, the despondency of a failure, the gener­osity of a martyr, the disaster of an innocent—is there anything in the world that is not seized upon by the professional story-teller and made his own, to be ex­posed at one-fifty a peep to the eyes of boys and girls who have more vital energy than they can find opportunity to use, and to papas and mamas who would enjoy a laugh at Don Quixote's expense and a tear or two over poor King Lear?

The object of all their art—and sometimes it is a great art—is to interest indolent readers or spectators, transport them outside their petty, narrow, personal lives, unenlightened, trivial, humiliating, burdensome. Give the word buffoon its highest, noblest, most heroic meaning, if you will! But let me apply it to those who seek some recompense for amusing by writing, though their reward be a dead branch of laurel, an epigraph on a tombstone, a round of applause in a theater, or ten thousand dollars cash.

Do you think such things befit men conscious of their place in this mysterious and awe-inspiring uni­verse? Do you think that the few of us who can see four spans farther than these children and know the end awaiting us if we do not courageously conquer destiny—upbuilding a purer life against the menace of ultimate Nothingness—do you think, I ask, that we should encourage such childishness and fatuity in men, stopping them in front of cardboard theaters to watch the antics of dreamland puppets, and listen to the joys and woes of silly phantoms?

Why all this misplaced compassion? Why waste so much genius in amusing and soothing men? How much finer, how much more dangerous it would be to startle them from their slumbers, bring them face to face with the darkness about us, dangle them head down into the Abyss of Nothing, forcing them to rouse themselves, know themselves, become sadder but nobler in the face of a universe which now barely con­cedes them life!

Away with novels, stories, legends, tragedies! If you're bored, there's bridge! Or try a bath in the salt sea! Let genius no longer be used to furnish enter­tainment for idlers, to reanimate people who have once been or will never be—but rather to proclaim new, and better lives, to prepare an earth that will know no sorrow save the sorrows of the spirit, and bring forth men bent not on forgetting, but on remembering and promising!