Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

I got “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Saturday morning and finished it Sunday evening. Yup, it was a real “page turner”.

Don’t worry, I won’t give away any plot details. I just wanted to say that it was a truly awesome read, and JK Rowling writes exceptional novels.

And now to the marketing.

On the Deathly Hallows jacket it quotes JK Rowling saying that Harry Potter “just strolled into my head fully formed”. It also says “during the next five years she outlined the plots for each book”. So, over a period of five years she wrote the plots for all the novels? What if the first book hadn’t been published? Wasn’t that an enormous risk to take? Why not just write one book containing the full Harry Potter story?

In retrospect, writing seven books over several years was marketing genius because each published book generated more hype and marketing power for the next in the series… until you get the situation where the Deathly Hallows sells 8.3 million copies in the USA in its first 24 hours according to Scholastic, the US publisher!

But was that worth the gamble that the first book wouldn’t get published? How many other authors would take five years to plan a whole series of books in the hopes that they would all get published? I find that quite amazing. Perhaps she had a book deal for one or more books early on. Apparently, she signed with Bloomsbury Childrens Books in 1996 for “just a couple of thousand pounds“.

Barry Cunningham, who signed Rowling, said, “I bought the first two books in a deal that was negotiated in five minutes. The first thing she said was: ‘How do you feel about sequels?’. So then she told me and I was amazed she had it all worked in her mind. To have him grow up was really radical because in those days in most children’s sequels the same thing happened again, then again and then again. But to have him grow up and change and deal with threats from dark forces, that’s something different and Jo has really taken the audience with her. The success is mostly down to the quality of the imagination.”

Luckily for Harry Potter fans, the series was published and I thoroughly enjoyed every one of the books.

update, found at the Bloomsbury.com site… “A few months after ‘Harry’ was accepted for publication in Britain, an American publisher bought the rights for enough money to enable Jo to give up teaching and write full time - her life’s ambition!”… which helps to explain how the two books became seven.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Current posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.