Remember how we used to have to wait until Labor Day, or at least late July, to declare one title the book of the summer? We haven’t had that pleasure much in recent years, and we surely won’t have it this one: six months before it went up for sale—and, for all we know, before it was even completely written—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last installment of the phenom wizard series, was clearly the winner. No. 1 on Amazon on many days in the months before publication (occasionally bumped off by such flashes-in-the-pan as Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana), the highest number of Amazon preorders in history (one million) and countless (and I really do mean countless—Google lists 2,470,000 references to this book alone; untold more for sites that misspell the title “Hollows.”) stories have guaranteed that the unprecedented 12-million-copy first printing of Hallows will, as they say, fly off the shelves.
Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that. As we’ve been saying and believing for years, anything that’s this good for one book and one publisher is good for us all; a book, or a series, that inspires both kids and adults to read (no mean feat to snag both of those groups) can never be bad; besides, all this Harry hoopla puts books on the front pages and the TV screens and thus gets people into the stores. In fact, we should all be grateful: we haven’t seen this kind of culture-drenching phenomenon since... well, no one can think of a comparison, since the Nancy Drew and Little House on the Prairie books didn’t have Harry’s demographic crossover, and even mega—Mitch Albom or list-hog James Patterson would trade their P&Ls for Potter’s in a heartbeat.
Given all this, it seems churlish to even suggest that there’s a downside, that the wizard has wrought havoc in any way. And while I doubt that all this megapublicity—the carefully controlled yet breathless announcements from Scholastic with which most news outlets, including this one, dutifully fill their pages—will have a backlash effect on the Harry-hungry public (or on Scholastic’s coffers), there are some side effects of Pottermania. Take, for example, the retailers, big and small. The former have made the dubious choice to discount HPATDH so drastically that even they admit their profit margins—on the most popular book in history!—will be smaller this year. The latter can’t begin to compete with the economies of scale, and some may bypass their distributors and buy direct—at nearly the same discount—from Amazon or Costco. And what of the writer or publisher trying to score magazine, TV or radio time this summer for his sensitive first novel or delightful beach read? Good luck: summer 2007 is already and will forever be remembered as all Harry Potter, all the time.
Still, we continue to insist Harry is good for business, and lament that starting next year, we’ll be back to square one, scrambling to find the next big thing, to capitalize on the book business frenzy that was Harry’s truest wizardry. What that will be and whether we’ll succeed remain to be seen, now that we won’t have Harry to push us around any more.
Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson
