Potter series has changed the bookselling business
Posted on Thursday, August 2, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/197461/
NEW YORK — Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former head of Warner Books, remembers publishing one of the biggest sensations of its time: Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, the authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Ripley’s novel, with its answer to a decades-old tease — whether Scarlett and Rhett end up together — was a guaranteed, instant bestseller. It deserved the fullest first printing the market could handle in 1991: 500, 000 copies. The rollout for the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, makes the fuss for Scarlett look primitive. Potter’s first printing was 12 million. Its sales after the first hour exceeded the first printing of Scarlett. After 24 hours, worldwide sales had topped 10 million, with 8. 3 million in the United States alone.
But the numbers do more than capture the appeal of Deathly Hallows: They reflect how the market has changed. Production and communication systems were far slower at the time of Scarlett, Amazon. com did not exist, superstores were only getting started and price clubs weren’t selling nearly as many books.
No book before Deathly Hallows sold so quickly. No book could have. “With Potter, you have almost a perfect storm of events,” says Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins. “You have changes in technology and capacity, the synergy that worked so effectively between the books and the movies, and, most importantly... they were books of startling quality.”
“I surely would hesitate before trying to do something like 12 million copies for Dan Brown’s next book, but thanks largely to Potter, we can think about numbers we wouldn’t have imagined before,” says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, which released the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code.
Creating Potter demand was easy; a brief announcement of the release date, July 21, immediately sent Deathly Hallows to the top of best-seller lists. Supply was the challenge, coordinated in the U. S. by a trio at Scholastic Inc. who worked together on the last four Potter books: Ed Swart, director of operations and distribution; Andy Yablin, vice president of global logistics; and Francine Colaneri, vice president of manufacturing and purchasing.
The release of Deathly Hallows was a timed worldwide gala, embargoed until midnight. Scholastic’s planning began at least a year ago, before Rowling had finished the book, when Colaneri began consulting with printers about possible production dates, getting a sense of when they could handle such an unprecedented order.
Colaneri would not say when Rowling turned in her manuscript — the publication date was announced in February. But she did say that thanks to digital scanning (instead of using film, under the old system ), the time spent getting a template ready was cut in half from what it would have been a decade ago — “a matter of weeks,” she says.
Scholastic benefited from technology that wasn’t in wide use before the 1990 s. Greater access to e-mail meant lengthy, complex documents could be transmitted instantly, and legibly, unlike a fax or letter. Satellite tracking allowed the publisher to know the exact location of every delivery truck.
“We could see that a trailer was stuck in traffic and running two hours late,” Yablin says. “We could then ring up a store and tell them when to expect the delivery. In the old days, we had to wait to hear from the store.”
Book production was accelerated, Colaneri says. Before Potter, lengthy hardcovers had to pass through binding equipment twice and then were joined together. Starting with the fifth Potter, the 600-plus-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, manufacturers altered presses to allow the entire text through at one time.
Since the first Potter book came out, in 1997, every aspect of the business has consolidated and expanded. Amazon. com and Barnes & Noble each received more than 1 million pre-orders, unimaginable a decade ago. There are fewer (but larger ) printing companies, truck carriers and wholesalers.
“From strictly a distribution perspective, fewer distributors or distribution center delivery destinations at increased volumes per destination is more efficient,” says Swart. “It should be remembered that the early Harry Potter books were first sold and embraced by the independents and the traditional bookstore chains, and only after they attained their eventual popularity were they picked up by the wider distribution network.”
Numbers for Deathly Hallows were historic, especially for hardcovers. Random House Inc. spokesman Stuart Applebaum was a publicist in the 1970 s for Bantam Books, a leading paperback publisher, when it had enormous success with The Exorcist and Jaws.
Helped by blockbuster movie adaptations, both sold millions of copies, including at supermarkets and other nontraditional outlets. But paperbacks were distributed far more widely at the time than hardcovers. And they sold millions over a period of months, not hours.
“It wasn’t conceivable for a hardcover book to have that kind of sales, even for a book as sought after as Jaws,” Applebaum says. “At that time, the mass market paperback was the format for multimillion sellers. But mass merchandisers weren’t selling as many books, and at the same velocity, as they do today.”
A decade ago, the maximum first printing for a hardcover would have been about 1 million or 2 million, for John Grisham or Stephen King, says Laurie Brown, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Harcourt. Each new Potter raised the roof — from 3. 8 million copies for Book 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to 10. 8 million for Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to 12 million for Deathly Hallows.