It's worse than that. One of the cover blurbs reads "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest and most accomplished writers in the country." The magnitude of that lie must have warped space-time for a few significant seconds around the head of the writer, one Nelson DeMille, who has at a blow ensured that I would rather lick a cockroach than read anything he "wrote". (The inverted commas being because he clearly wouldn't know writing if it wrote adjectives up his leg with a soldering iron). Unless, of course, he means "best, smartest and most accomplished" to signify "enormously successful in financial terms", in which case, fair comment.

I think the bulk of the world's readers of popular lit do, in fact, equate success with quality. Tragically.