Business Insight Zone

To kick off our coverage of Harry Potter, some tidbits:

–Jo Rowling is the only author to become a billionaire by her pen.

–Do a search on “Harry Potter” on eBay and you’ll find thousands of products spread across dozens of categories — books and DVDs, of course, but also trading cards, action figures, video games, wristwatches, clothing of all types, advertising, body jewelry, comics, bedding, party supplies,* collectible kitchenware, pins and badges, lunchboxes, sheet music, and, so help me, “exonumia.”**

–Figures on book sales can be imprecise, but by any accounting, the six Harry Potter novels to date have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, and they’ve sold strongly in the four corners of the earth. (The books have been translated into more than 60 languages.) In the English-speaking world, they’ve mostly made a wreck of previous records for fastest sales: the sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sold at least 4.1 million copies in its first two days of release in mid-2005, and the figure might have been closer to 7 million. When its release date was announced this January, the much-anticipated seventh novel (that’s the series finale, in case you’ve been hiding on Mars), broke all records for pre-orders at Amazon.com, records that had mostly been set by its own prequels.

–Ah, yes, and the movies . . . My family just got back from an opening-day matinee of the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.*** (Interesting note: this is the shortest of the films to date, at 138 minutes, yet the movie adapts the longest of the books.) Warner Bros. has done, uh, fairly well with the pictures so far. According to IMDB, the first four movies rank 4th, 9th, 12th, and 19th on the all-time worldwide box office list, with a total gross of $3.5 billion between them. I’m not an expert on the movie business, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they call a “franchise.”

So, the moral of this story: the numbers attached to Harry Potter are enough to make you giggle. From now until July 21 (when the last book comes out), we’ll be looking at several different business facets of this phenomenon in more detail.

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* A couple of years ago, my daughter — the biggest Harry Potter fan I know, and I know a few — had a birthday cake that was decorated as a Quidditch field, complete with tiny plastic towers, grandstands, pennons, and ring-shaped goals. She was over the moon.

** The OED defines “exonumia” thus: “Objects of historical interest which lie outside the field of numismatics but which relate to or resemble coins or currency, such as medals, tokens, badges, coupons, etc.” And oh, the thunder that will roll when next I find myself with A, I, M, N, O, X, and U to place alongside an open E on the Scrabble board. Okay, that could be a while.

*** Good flick. Or as my six-year-old son whispered to me after the climactic fight between the forces of good and evil, “This is a really good movie.”

Category: Media