Potter Cloud?
Published June 25, 2003
Interesting angle from Publishers Weekly on the overwhelming Harry Potter sales numbers:
- Sales figures for the opening months of Potter have shot up with each successive book, but they're going up a lot faster than backlist sales are. Or, put another way, for Harry Potter, the initial release is becoming a lot more important - and the years that follow a lot less.
Take a reasonable time-frame for a franchise like this - say, two-and-a-half years after publication. For Harry 2, the first six months accounted for about 34% of sales for that period, what seems like a reasonable amount. For Harry 3 the number edged up to 37%, higher but also still reasonable. For Harry 4, though, it skyrocketed to 65% - meaning that only about one-third of the book's total sales came after the first six months. Basically, while with each new book the series is gaining momentum as a sensation, a literary event and a frontlist title, it's not becoming a correspondingly strong backlist one.
Of course, many publishers would gladly trade their annual revenues for just one month of Potter backlist sales. Still, amid all the reports of how sales for the opening weekend of Harry 5 nearly doubled that of Harry 4, it seems worth remembering that sales for the opening six months of Harry 4 more than doubled that of Harry 3 - but that in the respective two-year periods that followed, Harry 4 sales were actually 30% lower than Harry 3. As seminal as this past weekend was, the next hundred will further tell the tale.
- Potter Cloud?
- Published: June 25, 2003
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- Section: Books
- Filed Under: Books: Children, Books: Fantasy, Books: News
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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I don't see why this is bad, really. I didn't buy any of the Potter books 'til after the first movie came out--that's when I was introduced to the whole thing. But I was in line for the fifth one at midnight.
Piles and piles of older Harry Potter books.
I guess the hope is that with the hoopla people who haven't read the series will start because of the hype.
My experience is parallel to Alex's. I only heard about the Potter craze thru a new friend in 2001. I then spent 6 months ragging her for even reading such kiddie babble (Hello Kettle, you're black). I received all of the books (for free) and they sat in my office until I saw the movie (a month or so after its release).
The movie was it for me, I finally picked up the book thinking I have nothing better to do, check it out. I was hooked. I read all four in the course of a week and I too was at Barnes and Nobles amidst the kiddies in Potter Heaven on the release of book 5.
I had a friend guy staying with me at the time and he started reading because he saw how much I enjoyed them and he became a Potter junkie too.
I believe since the series is such a mass produced sensation that all the major fans the book will have are stationary. The book is that artificial adrenaline rush that you wait on and once its over its over, you're chasing the initial high until the next book is released. So 7 better be damn good.
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That fits my experience -- we've bought each book closer to its initial release. While we've bought all the books, we didn't buy the first two until years after they were released as paperbacks, and they were Christmas presents. The third my daughter bought shortly after it came out in paperback, and the the fourth my son bought as a hardback as soon as he scraped the bucks together. We were all there at midnight, June 21 for the Order of the Phoenix.