BookOpinion

With a staggering 12 million print run, the anticipation grows for the release of the J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Harry Potter is a multi-billion dollar brand.

It’s still three months away from the release, but J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has remained atop Amazon’s bestsellers list for a few weeks. The total count on their “Muggle Counter”, which approximates sales from Amazon and “U.S. syndicated store sites, such as Borders.com, but excludes all third-party seller arrangements,” is now up to more than 575,000 — growing by 100,000 in the past two weeks.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger breaks down some of the numbers of the Harry Potter mega brand:

…Never before has a book series been so popular or more financially successful. Worldwide, there are 325 million copies of the previous six Harry Potter books. The first four Harry Potter movies (a fifth, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” is scheduled to open July 13) have grossed more than $3.5 billion worldwide, and Rowling is the first-ever billionaire author….

The tale of Rowling

The origins of the Harry Potter series have become the stuff of legend. Harry was hatched in Rowling’s imagination on a train ride from Manchester to London in 1990. She wrote much of the book, longhand, at Nicolson’s cafe, now a Chinese restaurant, in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she moved with her infant daughter shortly after a divorce. Too poor to make a copy of the manuscript, she typed two and sent them out. Several rejections later, Bloomsbury bought the book for the equivalent of $4,000. Arthur Levine, an editor with his own imprint at Scholastic, read the manuscript on a plane trip from New York City to Bologna, Italy, and eventually outbid seven other companies for the U.S. rights.

The initial U.S. printing of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (the U.S. version of the title) in 1998 was a mere 50,000 copies. By the time the sixth book was released in July 2005, Scholastic printed 10.8 million. Today, only the Bible and “Quotations from Chairman Mao” have more copies in print than the Harry Potter books.

“We’re very, very excited about book seven,” said Kyl Good, a Scholastic representative. “This is going to be the biggest publishing event ever, and we get to bring this to millions of readers.”

He’s everywhere

Virtually no corner of the world has been untouched by “Pottermonium.” The series has been translated into 64 languages, including one dead one (Latin), and the name Harry Potter is familiar to hundreds of millions, whether they are Lithuanian (Haris Poteris), Chinese (Ha li po te) or Arabic (Hari Butar). Even parodies of the Harry Potter series have been translated into Belarusian and Hungarian.

In the hours after the Feb. 1 announcement of book seven’s publication date, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was No. 1 with a bullet on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble Web sites. To date, at least a half-million copies already have been ordered on Amazon.com (where the book is selling at a 46 percent reduced rate of $18.89 instead of the list price of $34.95), including one by the librarian at the military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The biggest winners in the financial windfall that is Harry Potter, other than Rowling, have been Bloomsbury and Scholastic. When the title of the seventh book was announced at the end of December 2006, shares of Scholastic gained more than 2 percent in a single day. And earlier this year, when Bloomsbury revealed the publication date — on the London Stock Exchange, to boot — its own shares rose 2.2 percent.

But as Harry goes, so goes the publishing industry. At the end of the fiscal calendar for 2005, Scholastic, which did not publish a Harry Potter title that year, experienced a 15 percent drop in sales in its children’s-book division.

Rowling and her publishers, as well as the movie industry and the manufacturers of literally thousands of items of merchandise, are not the only beneficiaries of Harry Potter’s financial prowess.

Companion books

The series also has spawned books about the series, including “What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7,” co-authored by 20-year-old Emerson Spartz, who founded one of the most popular Harry Potter Web sites, www.mugglenet.com.

“I just learned that Wal-Mart has ordered 30,000 copies of the book,” Spartz said earlier this month. “And it’s on the New York Times children’s books best-seller list,” added the sophomore business major at the University of Notre Dame.

After an initial printing of just 9,000, there are now 270,000 copies of “What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7″ in print, according to Spartz….

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