Stop Press! Just Announced! The New Dan Brown...

I really hope Waterstone's aren't doing the whole targeted e-marketing thing again. If they are, I'm offended that they sent me an announcement that said, "Just announced! The new Dan Brown... Pre-order The Lost Symbol at half price now! Only £9.49. You save £9.50. Published 15th September 2009."

Several points to note here:

1. Good use of synecdoche--"the new Dan Brown" standing for "the new book by renowned author Dan Brown." Actually, it's a sort of reverse synecdoche--"Dan Brown" standing for a part of himself (i.e. his "literary" work).

2. Good use of italics in The Lost Symbol; shame the rest of that sentence--"at half price now!"--sounds so sloppy (maybe it was an extract from the book).

3. Only £9.49? In these crunchy times, you might think they would send The Lost Symbol straight to paperback... Then again, it's been six years since Da Vinci so all those fan(atic)s will probably be more than happy to shell out for the hardback edition.

4. Do people really place orders for books that are not going to be published for another five months? It's not as though it allows you to read the book any quicker and I really can't imagine that there will be "shortages" of Dan Browns (unfortunately, perhaps). Of course, the Angels and Demons trailers are in the cinemas at the moment and the movie is due out in a few weeks (shockingly, it's not supposed to be as bad as The Da Vinci Code and it does have Ewan McGregor in it (and no Audrey Tautou!), which almost counteracts the presence of the Hanks) so Waterstone's are probably timing their e-blast to coincide with that.

Best of all, another Dan Brown means a plethora of new Language Log posts dissecting every last linguistic oddity and sloppy usage. Hooray! In fact, I think I'm going to go and read some of those archive posts; after all, I only have five months to prepare myself for the new wave!