When Dan Brown writes a new book, he doesn’t need to advertise it – the book can advertise itself.

You’ve seen the millions of commuters all holding Dan Brown’s books up to their nose every morning. And you’ve seen packs of sweaty, clueless-looking Americans stumbling around Paris and Rome squawking “Ooh, The Da Vinci Code! Ooh, Angels & Demons!” in the belief that The Louvre was only built so that Tom Hanks could run around it in a funny wig.

But still, Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol comes out soon, and this time he is advertising it. On FACEBOOK!

There’s no doubt that Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol will be a massive success. This is because all his other books are massive successes. This is because Dan Brown understands that making idiots feel intelligent in a slightly patronising way is absurdly profitable.

Dan Brown has found his formula and it works – take a lead character with a bewilderingly awful haircut, have him run around a European city while looking quizzically at an old book, build everything up to a climax that doesn’t make any sense and then blame the Catholics for everything. Bingo. Another truckload of cash to Mr Brown.

And everyone’s confident that the formula works, because five million copies are going to be published in the first run alone. Whichever way you look at it, you’re not going to be able to escape it. People will be reading it on the bus. People will be talking about it on TV, bookshops – remembering the wave of excitement when Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows was released – will organise special midnight opening events where lonely people can dress up as a crap-haired detective or a burning pope or whatever.

But at least you can keep away from all the The Lost Symbol kerfuffle on the internet, right? It’s not like anyone’s going to suddenly ambush you about it on Facebook, right? WRONG! AP reports:

Publisher Doubleday announced Tuesday that Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” — his first novel since “The Da Vinci Code” — will be preceded by a summer-long procession of “codes, cryptic trivia, puzzles, secret history, maps, aphorisms” and other daily teasers on Facebook and Twitter.

Oh goody. We genuinely can’t wait for someone on Twitter called @Robert_Langdon to start following us so that he can bombard us with endless cryptic messages like “I need help decoding this anagram. It says: BUY THE NEW DAN BORWN BOOK” and “Does anyone know a good conditioner for shit hair that looks like it was carved out of a chunk of vinyl?” and “Hey, remember the time my mate turned out to be descended from Jesus? What an inexplicable coincidence that was.”

No, really. We can’t wait for that.

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