Hyping Dan Brown's New Novel

Next week Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol will be published. Until then, we'll all have to suffer through its marketing frenzy. In advance of the publication of the book, a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, the publisher has hired Special Ops Media, a marketing company, to tweet clues about the author. Oddly, no one at Special Ops has been allowed to read it, but Matt Lauer has, and this morning—having signed an agreement not to reveal too much—he commenced the Today Show's weeklong countdown to celebrate the book's release. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos told customers on his company's homepage that their stockpile of copies is being kept "under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure," and 70,000 copies have been pre-ordered. Booksellers, in hopes that Brown's book will boost sagging sales, are stocking related titles about, say, the secrets of the Freemasons. Says a store buyer: “It was a mini-industry for a while, and that would be just dandy.”