'The Lost Symbol' sales dip in third week

The Lost Symbol has lost ground. According to Amazon’s best-sellers list, Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel has slipped quietly down to third place. At both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the top two spots are occupied by pre-orders for the recently moved-up memoir by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (Going Rogue: An American Life is now due in stores Nov. 17, well before its initial spring 2010 release) and Arguing With Idiots by lachrymose talking head Glenn Beck.

Is Symbol’s slip to be expected? Are we experiencing a Brown-out of sorts, in which everyone who was going to buy the book has already bought it or borrowed it from a friend? The novel will likely see a resurrection in sales once the holiday season rolls around and gift purchases start up, but for now at least its iron grip on the best-seller charts has slackened.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, a bookstore in Chicago is reporting that the latest Windy City-themed issue of Granta, a quarterly literary magazine, has been outselling Symbol. I never thought I’d see the day that Wole Soyinka, whose work is included in the issue, would be more in demand than the author of The Da Vinci Code. Maybe Chicagoans really do have something going for them, and I should start reconsidering my position on deep-dish.

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Comments (12 total) Add your comment
  • Diane

    I bought three copies on preorder at Amazon (for me and two friends.) My father got three copies for his birthday. I wonder how many copies were preordered?

  • Alex

    I haven’t bought it yet because I’m in the middle of reading the very lengthy Outlander series. But once I’m done with that I plan on purchasing my own copy of The Lost Symbol.

  • RustyT

    I’m not sure word of mouth on the book has been all that great. I just finished it, and I found it highly repetitive and not all that compelling. Langdon doesn’t get used very well in it, so I don’t think it will have anywhere near the phenomenonal staying power of Davinci Code. To me, it isn’t even as compelling a read as Angels & Demons, with its wonderfully gnarly murders and great back-drop.

  • JB

    It’s a pretty crappy book. And we live in a super-connected world. We see this all the time in movies – once word gets out, everyone knows to avoid it and it dies after a few weeks.

    • ND

      Its also pretty pricey. I mean, sure, I’d like to read it but at $17 I can get 2 or 3 paperbacks and for $11 I can buy Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, which I KNOW will be amazing.

  • Joshua College Station

    I bought a copy already for me!! I think I might buy 10 more to hand out to friends too!!! She will be the next US President! I can’t wait!

    • marebear79

      BOOOOOOOOO!!! Read the book, enjoy her limited points of view–but spare your friends her idiocy and mundanity!

  • j mc kenna

    Rubbish from start to finish.

  • Margaret Henry Pokusa

    Lost Symbol was more of a screen play than novel. Other than the last 25 pages or so, it was written to provide the blueprint for the eventual film. And there was no bonafide antagonist. The character of Mal’akh was cartoonish rather than credible. The Freemason storyline conveyed no real tension either. If Brown writes yet another story around Langdon, he should develop the character of Katherine Solomon and weave her story with Robert Langdon’s.

  • dclark1983

    Very anticlimatic ending and repetitive use of the same word “esoteric” and the annoying constant reminders of the well incident and his Mickey Mouse watch. It is almost as if a 14 year old wrote a novel.

  • Handsome Smitty

    Journalism is dead. Your political tint to this article is abysmal. It’s ‘news,’ not ‘spews.’

  • Jen

    I read this book the day it came out. I loved Angels & Demons and liked daVinci Code, but this Lost Symbol was not very good. And as a Christian, I was more offended by this book than his other books.

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