Category: publishing

Seven million copies of the new Harry Potter were sold in the first 24 hours it was on sale. How many is that? A little perspective: “Retailers said that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had sold more copies in a day than The Da Vinci Code sold in one year. WH Smith said it sold 13 copies a second on Saturday. This breaks the book chain’s previous record of eight copies a second, which was held by the last tale by JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

“‘How’s your book going?’ has become my least favourite question. I used to think writers didn’t like talking about their works-in-progress because they were afraid people would steal their brilliant ideas. Now I know the truth. Writers hate talking about their books because they’re sick to death of them. That and the fact that, on any given day, they secretly suspect that their books might stink. And let’s face it, most books do stink…”

So, as it turns out, all the hype and overwrought speculation that preceded the unveiling of the latest book in the Harry Potter series turned off kids around the world, who collectively yawned at the carefully orchestrated release. […pause for effect…] Hah. We kid. The durn thing’s already sold several million copies, and that’s only the beginning. Bookstores were crammed full, and the midnight release parties were as swinging as ever. Basically, it’s Harry’s world, and we’re just living in it.

The debate over the morality of Harry Potter continues unabated in religious circles. Last week, the Pope made headlines when a letter he wrote as Cardinal Ratzinger was released, including a passage in which he called the books a series of “subtle seductions [that] erode Christianity in the soul before it can even grow properly.” Still, other Christian authorities insist that the books are morally upstanding, and reinforce religious tenets in much the way that the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien did. “The magic jump-starts your interest, but what the books are really about is values.”

The new Harry Potter book sold an astonishing 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours, smashing the record held by the previous Potter release. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” averaged better than 250,000 sales per hour, more than the vast majority of books sell in a lifetime.

With the mega-success of JK Rowling and her Harry Potter series, many believe children’s book writers are raking in the dough. “Waterstone’s had reported that 10 times more new children’s books were being released every month now compared with 2000, and it found that publishers were spending much more on marketing the genre.” But a new survey says that children’s book writers earn barely subsistance wages – a full third of them earn less than the national minimum wage of £8,827 a year.

How popular is Harry Potter? The sixth book in the series is expected to sell more than 2 million copies in Britain alone in the first 24 hours it is on sale. Ten million copies have been earmarked for the U.S. market, and eventual sales numbers could eclipse even those of previous volumes in the series. In order to achieve all this, of course, the marketers are working overtime, as they have before the release of each of the books.

Harry Potter has seemingly become one of those cultural touchstones that is immune to criticism. Not that there aren’t Harry-haters – there are, but they generally get chalked up as curmudgeons out to ruin everyone else’s innocent good time. But Robert Winder has serious concerns about the craze, and they aren’t just literary. For one thing, the “crass commercialism” of the series has become suffocating. For another, is it really wise to be giving kids one more portrait of the modern world as a place where good and evil are clearly defined, when all our energies are engaged in trying to make sense of a world dominated by gray areas?

“As the sixth issue of Rowling’s Harry Potter series – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – is about to be released, the news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expressed serious reservations about the novels is now finally being revealed to the English-speaking world still under the impression the Vatican approves the Potter novels.”

“Last month a judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo said that the 76-year-old author Orianna Fallaci should answer to claims of abusing Islam in her book The Strength of Reason. Since then, her cause has become a rallying point for mainly rightwing intellectuals and politicians in Italy and the US, where Ms Fallaci lives.”