Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Three notes on this Monday after The Final Book Relase as we wind down our Harry Potter coverage:

1. Although it slipped from the #1 spot in the US over the weekend, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix continues to pile up large box office receipts, to the tune of more than $200 in the US and more than $550 million worldwide. Business has been especially brisk outside the US. These numbers mean that the series as a whole has grossed more than $4 billion. Pretty solid for a wizard-and-witches franchise, eh?

2. Despite leaked advance copies that led to plot spoilers being posted on the Internet, the worldwide release of the final novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was, shall we say, a commercial success. Variety has details here:

In a rare instance of the printed word grabbing the spotlight over movies and videogames, youthful buyers snapped up 8.3 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in its first 24 hours of release in the U.S. this weekend.

Tally for the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s mega-selling series tops the previous record for the first day of a book’s release, which belonged to Potter as well: The series’ sixth installment, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” sold nearly 7 million copies in its first 24 hours when it bowed in July 2005, according to U.S. publisher Scholastic.

The most common number I’ve seen quoted for the previous overall sales of the first six novels is 325 million copies, so we can expect radical revisions to that number within, well, moments. But while Rowling is already, according to many sources, the richest author ever (the first dollar-billionaire from books, etc.), in terms of copies sold she still has a ways to go to catch a few other British women, including Agatha Christie (something like 2 billion copies sold), Barbara Cartland (perhaps 1 billion copies), and Enid Blyton (upwards of 500 million copies). Then again, all of those women wrote scores or hundreds of different titles, while Rowling has made her mark with less than ten.

3. Having seen the latest movie on its opening day, my own family spent this entire weekend thoroughly absorbed in the book. My wife and daughter came home empty-handed from their midnight bookstore tour the other day, but our pre-ordered copy was delivered to us by 2 p.m. Saturday. My daughter, wife, and I had all read it by 8 p.m. Sunday. When you think of it, even eight million copies sold is a small number when compared to the total number of households in the US, but at least in my family’s social circle, this is all anybody can talk about.