WSJ.com – The ‘Da Vinci’ Cash Cow

WSJ.com – The ‘Da Vinci’ Cash Cow
For book publishers, the most provocative question raised by the upcoming movie version of “The Da Vinci Code” is: Can a three-year-old best seller that has already been endlessly milked for profits yield one more windfall for the industry?
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With the film opening in May, the publishing industry is placing one of its biggest bets ever on the staying power of a blockbuster book. Publishers are using the movie’s release to anchor numerous “Da Vinci”-related titles and tie-ins, including the novel’s first U.S. paperback run. And all of them are trying to harness the selling power of the most successful novel in recent memory, with an estimated 40 million copies in print world-wide.

The pile-on is a common model in the book world, but “Da Vinci” is having an unusually long run of tie-ins. “The publishing industry sees something that’s working and keeps doing it until it keels over,” says Robert Miller, president of Walt Disney’s Hyperion book-publishing unit. “When angels were hot, the first 40 books about them succeeded. Then not. The first 20 O.J. Simpson books worked. Then not.

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