Rowling is Brown’s only contemporary on the list. Recent estimates place total sales above eighty million, putting The Da Vinci Code among the top ten bestsellers of all time and placing Brown in the company of Charles Dickens, C.
But just a year later, on the first anniversary of the release, Doubleday announced it was “the bestselling adult novel of all time within a one-year period.” By then, nearly seven million copies were in print. Judging by the modest sales of his previous novel, Angels and Demons, two years earlier, it’s unlikely that either Brown or his publisher anticipated the new book’s sensational success. In April 2003, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code hit bookstores.
