Sonny Mehta

A few weeks ago, Paul Bogaards did something few good publicists, let alone the head of public relations at New York’s most patrician publishing house, would suggest their client do. In the early hours of Jan. 24, the 51-year-old executive director of publicity and marketing for Knopf posted “The Hierarchy of Book Publishing,” a top-100 ranking of his colleagues and competitors, on his personal Tumblr. Far from a fawning Forbes-style list, Mr. Bogaards’s blog post was a gallows-humor-inflected schematic of an industry in collapse. Books are so screwed, it suggested, that a

Tuesday was considered "D-Day" by many in the book publishing industry—as in Dan Brown Day. The "Da Vinci Code" author's much-anticipated sequel, "The Lost Symbol," was released in both print and electronic versions. The book's publisher Doubleday, an imprint of Random House's Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, had announced previously that the book would have a first printing of 5 million copies, the largest first print in Random House history.

Dan Brown's new novel, a follow-up to his "The Da Vinci Code"—which was the best-selling hardcover adult novel of all time with 81 million copies in print worldwide—will be released in the United States and Canada by Random House imprint Doubleday Sept. 15, announced Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.