How do you feel about Dan Brown ‘Symbol’ hype—Kindle kind included? Just five-percent of Day One sales in E?
“The sledgehammer promotion for the book is more noteworthy than its content. I got an e-mail the night before the book’s release, advising me to turn my Kindle on so I could receive a download while I slept. Maybe if I put my Kindle under my pillow it could have been downloaded into my brain instead. Yikes! Has any mass communication medium been free of marketing messages for The Lost Symbol?” – Jtkerwin in Michael Dirda’s Reading Room forum in the Washington Post.
The irony: Mea culpa, sorta. I’m not a Brown fan but—despite the free publicity for him—can’t resist the above quote.
Related—questions about E sales numbers: “Although Knopf Doubleday, which printed 5 million hardcover copies of ‘The Lost Symbol,’ has declined to say what proportion of the more 1 one million copies of hardcover and e-book editions it sold on the first day of the book’s release were actually in digital form, a person familiar with the sales figures said far less than 5 percent were electronic book editions.” So reports the New York Times.
Brown’s philanthropic priorities for tech: He donated $2.2 million to his old school, Phillips Exeter Academy, to help “provide computers and high-tech equipment for students in need.” Great. But is it possible that the already-well-endowed school could have gotten the money from other sources? Might he done better to have given it to have-not institutions without Exeter’s connections? The endowment in February was $782 million even after stock-market declines.
Background: Wikipedia on Dan Brown.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:51 am
There is still someone that is surprised when a mass market media blitz occurs to push the latest new thing?!?!?!
I’m surprised he’s surprised.
September 20th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
David, shame on you. Isn’t what is so great about America is that the have’s get more to have and the have nots — well who cares! Don’t we see this every day — when our esteemed congressional leaders are able to make use of their gold-plated medical plans at taxpayer expense but the “backbone” of the economic system — the self-employed — have to do without?
I really resent the idea that any rich person should think about giving their money to, say, the Washington, DC public school system just because it is loaded with poor and underprivileged, non-polo-playing students. True Americans know how important it is to keep the downtrodden down and trodden upon. It is truly anti-American when someone like Bill Gates gives moeny to help the poor.
(And in case it was missed, all of the above is said tongue-in-cheek/sarcastically. I agree, David, that there are much better charities for Brown’s money than Exeter. The one good note is that I am proud to say the none of his contribution came from my pocket — I’ve never bought or read a Dan Brown novel.)
September 20th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
David, the following is from my Kindle Nation Daily post on the Times blogs piece by Motoko Rich:
Without having any idea just who may be Rich’s “person familiar with the sales figures,” let me see if I can parse what I imagine to be his or her arithmetic a wee bit. Several years ago, the conventional wisdom was that online book sales comprised somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent of all book sales. Based on that wisdom, if there were a million copies of a book sold on Tuesday, it would be fair to reason that 50 to 100 thousand of those books were sold online. A certain relatively high percentage of those would have been sold by Amazon, and just over half of that number — say, 2o to 50 thousand — would have been downloaded to Kindles, given what we know already.
That’s all fair and reasonable, although my own guess at this point in time would push the entire structure of numbers a little higher based on three likelihoods:
* The overall U.S. percentage of all books being sold online has surely risen in the past few years and may well be between 15 and 25 per cent at present. This could well mean that Amazon, between hardcovers and ebooks, sold as many as 150,000 to 250,000 of Tuesday’s overall million “copies” of The Lost Symbol.
* It would also be fair to reason that, given its incredible on-site marketing power and connectivity with the credit card and bank accounts of tens of millions of American readers, Amazon experiences a larger market share with certain blockbuster book releases. This occurred with some of the Harry Potter books, and may have occurred with The Lost Symbol as well.
So maybe there were 20,000 Kindle downloads of Dan Brown’s book the other day, and maybe there were 100,000 or more. I’m not wedded to any particular numbers, and I certainly do not wish to be a cheerleader for Jeff Bezos’ bank account. The specific numbers themselves matter far less than the sense of inevitable momentum that will drive more and more authors, publishers, and readers toward the Kindle and other ebook platforms. And that sense of momentum is certainly building more palpably than it was, say, on Monday.
September 20th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
I very much appreciated your note, Steve. Yes, the numbers are hard to pin down for sure, and meanwhile we’ll hope that the e-book momentum continues. Certainly going by the IDPF samplings in general, the industry is picking up. May the higher estimates be the most accurate ones for the e-format sales of the Brown book!
Thanks,
David
September 21st, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Wow. The guy gives $2 million to his alma mater and he gets slammed because you don’t think the school deserves it. Besides not know anything about the large number of scholarships to deserving students from inner cities at Exeter and other such schools, perhaps Mr. Brown would like to honor the school he may feel deserves some credit for his success. No doubt, he has many, many millions more from where that came from. Maybe he’ll check in with you before deciding what to do with his next gift.