Related: JK Rowling keeps Harry Potter fate secret
BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- The Potter phenomenom began more than nine years ago when the reading public first met the neophyte wizard in "Harry Potter and the Soccerer's Stone," and now author J.K. Rowling has announced the final saga, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," will be published on July 21.
The novel is the seventh in the series and will hit the bookstores just eight days after the release of the film version of the fifth volume, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
Potter fans are turning blue in the face waiting for the final episode in which Rowling has implied she may kill of one of the main characters. She hasn't revealed the character's name, but actor Daniel Radcliffe -- aka Harry Potter -- may have helped her make that decision by revealing his body in the stage play "Equus."
Radcliffe's bare-chested pose in posters promoting the play have been a big hit with teenage girls, but many mothers worldwide have been shocked and dismayed.
But the burning question within the children's books publishing industry is what's next, especially for Scholastic, Rowling's American publisher. Scholastic represent about 37 percent of Potter's global books in print. When "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," number six in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.
"It's the question that everybody asks about," said Frederick Searby at J. P. Morgan, an equity analyst who follows Scholastic's stock. "What happens to Scholastic after Harry Potter?"
On the London Stock Exchange, the announcement of the new book's publication date by Bloomsbury, Rowling's British publisher, sent its shares up 2.2 percent. In New York trading, the shares of Scholastic rose about 1 percent in the morning but fell back by afternoon. In a year without Harry, his absence becomes an excuse for falling sales.
In the fiscal year ending May 31, 2005, one in which Scholastic did not publish a new hardcover Harry title, for example, sales in its children's book publishing division dropped 15 percent to 1.15 billion U.S. dollars from 1.36 billion dollars. Last year, several bookstore chains, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, mentioned the lack of a Harry Potter hardcover as a reason for declining sales in the second quarter.
Scholastic officials readily admit that there is no one book or series waiting in the wings to succeed the Harry Potter series, which has 120 million copies in print in the U.S. and 325 million worldwide.
"If I suggested that I had in the pipeline the one thing that is going to replace what Harry has been to the company, that would be arrogant and ill-informed," said Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic's trade and book fairs division. Instead, she said, the company had a number of projects that it believed could generate a sizable chunk of revenue.
Holton added the publication of the last Harry book does not signal the death of the series.
"I don't think there is an end to the Harry Potter franchise," she said, because new generations of readers will continue to discover the books. Currently, she said, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" sells about 500,000 copies a year.
Scholastic has signed a multi-book contract with Meg Cabot, the author of "The Princess Diaries" and "All-American Girl," Holton said on Thursday. Cabot is writing a series for younger girls that will be introduced in spring of 2008.
"Scholastic has dodged the big bullet twice," said Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University and an analyst for the Book Industry Study Group, which produces "Book Industry Trends," an annual study of book sales. "I think the company is essentially sound and will continue to be successful," he added. "But they're just not going to have that big cash flow and may have to go out into the marketplace and pay a lot of money to replace" Rowling.
Still, there's always this possibility: Rowling could just write another series. "At some point she'll come out of retirement and pull a Michael Jordan," said Searby of J. P. Morgan.
|
