Regarding Baigent/Leigh's 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code:

The respective figures for the two books are around 2m copies and 36m - still rising and set to rise even more sharply with the imminent release of the film version.

The claim by Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh is that "the central theme" of their book has been borrowed for the novel. The two men were noticeably not flanked by minders from their publishers: they are suing not Dan Brown but his publishers, for breach of UK copyright in the UK editions of the book. In a coincidence almost worthy of a conspiracy theorist, because of a string of takeovers in the industry, the books share the same publisher, Random House.

I'd noticed that traffic to my Kryptos site had doubled, with this time a sizeable percentage coming from a Guardian article that was published several months ago. Looks like this story is the reason: Brown is currently getting sued in the UK, and the Guardian article about it has a "see also" section referring to the Kryptos story.

There's speculation that the trial may delay the release of the movie. I wonder if that'll change the release date of my book! It's a strange feeling, seeing my own fortunes tied so closely to far away headlines...

Elonka