Dubbed a "new master of smart thrills" by Samantha Miller in People magazine, Dan Brown broke into the realms of bestsellerdom with his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, a "riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller," as Janet Maslin described the book in the New York Times. Brown already had three popular thrillers to his credit by the time he published The Da Vinci Code in 2003, but with that book Brown and his publishers experimented with a new marketing strategy, creating word-of-mouth among booksellers and reviewers with an "advance-copy bombardment . . . of ten thousand free books," according to Nick Paumgarten writing in the New Yorker. The promotion gamble worked; Brown, until then a largely "unheralded writer," according to Paumgarten, hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list in the first week of publication of Da Vinci, a most uncommon publishing phenomenon. For Brown, an English teacher turned author...