Da Vinci Code author pays price of fame

'The Da Vinci Code has sold roughly 25m copies in 44 languages around the world, including 10m hardcover copies in America. 10 times the sales of industry titans like John Grisham and Nora Roberts. While most books move into paperback within a year of their hardcover publication, Doubleday still has not scheduled a paperback. The author 'has stopped taking commercial flights because of the commotion that usually accompanies him -- with people lining up in the aisle to get his autograph on books, cocktail napkins, even the occasional air-sickness bag.' In other ways, Dan Brown says, life has not changed. "My writing process remains unchanged. I still get up at 4 a.m. every morning and face a blank computer screen. My current characters really don't care how many books I've sold, and they still require my same effort and cajoling to persuade them to do what I want." More here. Your intrepid blogger actually read the book one afternoon in Barnes and Noble (I buy only literature; fluff I read standing up in the store.) The book is an all-time best-seller because of its subject matter about Jesus having married Mary Magdalene with offspring alive in our time -- not because Brown is a terrific writer, which he ain't. Still, it's nice to see a nice guy, with the totally nondescript name of Dan Brown, make mad money in the writing trade.