Okay, Fine, I'll Talk About Harry Potter

As many of you may have heard, there's this book coming out, and for reasons I'm sure we're all aware of, it's going to have the largest first printing in history--somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 million copies in North America alone. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that news of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has managed to slip by anyone in the world at this point. And with the book coming right on the heels of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie, I think it's safe to anticipate a veritable feeding frenzy this June.

Now, it's not just those big numbers that make this book important. The fact that it's being published in the first place is something to remark on, considering that we already know nobody is going to make money on it. That's been true for the last few books; nobody, other than J.K. Rowling, makes a dime.

I know that seems counterintuitive, but here's how it works: sales of most bestselling books look like a bell curve. They increase, hit a peak, and then gradually decline. Not so for Harry Potter. Almost all sales of every Harry Potter novel take place on the day it is published. After that, they go flatline. Everybody knows it's coming, and they all need to have it as soon as they possibly can, which is understandable.

(Side note: I've read and enjoyed every Harry Potter book to date, but so help me, those books are ALL plot--the plot's amazing, but the characters aren't believable and the writing isn't much better, and I won't kid myself otherwise. The reason we all need our copies on the day of is because if we get them even a little bit later than everyone else, the spoilers will be everywhere and the whole book will be ruined).

Because of this, we get the discount wars. Every bookstore needs to have as many people as possible buying from them, or they can't hope to sell anything, and the easiest way to do this is to be the "loss leader," or the store that gives the most insane discount. For this last installment, some of the discounts are approaching 50%, and despite the increased cover price, there's just no way to make that profitable--not for the publisher, not for the bookstore, not for anybody.

The theory is that taking these ridiculous losses generates more foot traffic into stores, and thus more sales of books other than Harry Potter, and more future sales of other books (get people into your store, and they're more likely to come back next time they want another book). For me, though, it's hard to see how any amount of new sales could possibly make up for all the lost money on Harry Potter books. To give you an idea, Cormac McCarthy's The Road was just selected as Oprah's new bookclub pick, which pretty much makes it an automatic super-bestseller. As a result, Vintage (its publisher) printed 950,000 copies.

950,000. Less than 1/12 of how many copies are being printed of Harry Potter. Getting an idea of the magnitude of the loss here?

The thing that really kills me is that Scholastic could stop this pattern in its tracks by making Harry Potter books non-returnable and refusing to offer the discounts the bookstores want. There'd be nothing the bookstores could do about it; either pay up or don't stock Harry Potter (pretty obvious decision). Of course, they'd have to lower their discount to customers, but in all honesty, who thinks that people wouldn't pay $25 instead of $18 for the new Harry Potter? Considering what we've seen so far, I think most folks would gladly shell out.

UPDATE: Publisher's Lunch reports that the publisher is capping returns at 10% as an "eco-friendly" measure, which is in line with their decision to print the book on recycled paper. A nice way to limit the damage without pissing anybody off, I think.

There's two reasons I can think of why Scholastic wouldn't do this, and they're so closely related that you might even say they're the same thing. The possibilities are: (1) they're a bunch of sissies, and (2) they want to appease the fans.

Making the books non-returnable would create an unprecedented amount of drama at all levels of the trade. And with all the horror stories I've heard about sales reps from Scholastic getting screamed at--SCREAMED at--over the phone by bookstore buyers who felt they weren't getting enough copies, when I say unprecedented, I mean unprecedented. And really, who wants that?

For me, this is the really heart-warming thing about these books. The way I see it, the reason everyone's willing to take their losses isn't because of all this mumbo jumbo about generating future sales; it's really, truly for the fans. We know Harry Potter is going to sell; we don't need the parties and knight bus tours and all this craziness that goes on.

This is what makes entertainment better than other businesses: the people calling the shots on Harry Potter are people who like to read, and most of them reserve just as much of a place in their hearts for the books they publish as do the people who buy them. It's the same reason major houses still publish poetry. There's no money in poetry; it doesn't sell, and it almost never earns out. But the people at the top like it, so they put it out for the small audience that receives it.

Now, the movies are another matter. Movie deals are tricky business, and I'll have more to say about that later.