Harry Potter and the aging fan
When the first two Harry Potter novels came out in the late 1990s, Cinda Webb would sit in the upstairs hallway of her Irvine, Calif., home and read aloud as her two sons drifted off to sleep, visions of wizards dancing in their heads.
Her younger son, Jon, now 14, quickly became entranced and devoured all five books. But her older son, James, now 17, lost interest around the third volume.
So Webb and Jon will join 200 other bleary-eyed Harry fans at Irvine’s Whale of a Tale Children’s Bookshoppe for tonight’s midnight release of the sixth book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
James will likely be home, sound asleep.
“It’s about a little wizard boy, and when you’re a teenager you’re just not caring what happens to the guy with the wand,” says James, whose diet of nonfiction and the occasional mystery make Harry just so much kid stuff.
“I just wasn’t caught up with them,” he adds. “I never put on a cape and had a wand myself.”
If the publishers of author J.K. Rowling’s books have a challenge beyond how to spend the Harry Potter windfall, it is in trying to keep the series compelling for original readers who were 10 to 12 years old when Harry was introduced in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” but who now are heading off to college, jobs or even the war in Iraq.
While Rowling has aged Harry as the series progresses – he was 11 in the first book and is 16 in the new one – it’s unclear how interesting he will be to older teens on the verge of adulthood.
But with an initial printing of 10.8 million copies – up from 8.5 million for the fifth book – Harry’s American publisher, Scholastic Books, is investing in its optimism that people like James Webb are rare.
“Of course, we’ve lost some, but I don’t believe we’ve lost (a lot of) readers,” says Barbara Marcus, executive vice president of Scholastic in charge of children’s book publishing.
“I believe we have expanded to parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents,” she says. “And then we have the new readers. The beauty of the children’s market is that our readers come into the market and they grow with us. There are new children every year who are ready for Harry Potter.”
The series has done well for Scholastic, which bought the American rights for $105,000 before the first book was published in England. There are more than 103 million books in print in the United States, and when a new Harry book comes out, it accounts for about 10 percent of Scholastic’s annual $2.2 billion in revenues.
The first book still is the series’ top seller, and the total number of books in print decreases for each succeeding title even as the initial print runs have increased. Rather than signaling a tail-off in interest, Scholastic says the numbers reflect the amount of time each book has been available and the high number of young readers growing into the series.
Pre-orders for “The Half-Blood Prince” have been running at a record pace at Barnes & Noble stores and its Web site. Online bookseller Amazon.com says it does not have comparable data for the last book.
Both retailers were likely aided by the deeply discounted $17.99 sale price against a list price of $29.99, helping make “The Half-Blood Prince” their top seller almost continuously since pre-orders were accepted in December.
“If you’re a fan of the series and you’ve read all five books, you have to see what happens next,” says Amazon.com spokeswoman Kristin Mariani.
From the start, Rowling has planned a series that would become more complex as it went on. Harry has matured from unloved orphan to wizard-in-training, and the tone has evolved from light fantasy to dark suspense, with death and the fight between good and evil becoming dominant themes.
“It’s the kind of depth and sophistication that can be appreciated by an older age group as well as a very clear and compelling plotline that draws in the younger children,” says Arthur A. Levine, the Scholastic editor who signed the series.
“It’s never been a book for very young children,” Levine says. “In the early stages we thought it would be mostly 10- to 14-year-olds. The unusual qualities of the book were that even though there’s sophisticated wordplay and humor and political satire that is appreciated by older readers, the younger readers are going for the more direct issues of character.”
As it is, Harry has sparked massive changes in children’s publishing, proving that kids will lay aside their GameBoys and Xboxes for novels that rival “Anna Karenina” in length.
“Hardcover Harry Potter books have brought kids to a new dimension of reading,” says Alex Uhl, owner of A Whale of a Tale and a director of the American Booksellers for Children. “They’ve brought to publishers an interest in making and publishing better books.
“The bar has been set pretty high for kids in that age group. They’re pretty sophisticated readers. They love rich language.”
Harry’s success has spilled over onto other youth-oriented books, such as T.A. Barron’s “Merlin” and “Avalon” series and the planned “Inheritance Trilogy” by Christopher Paolini, 19, who began writing the first installment, “Eragon,” when he was 15.
C.S. Lewis’ classic “The Chronicles of Narnia” has also seen a resurgence, driven in part by a movie version scheduled for December release that is already being promoted in theaters.
“Harry created an interest in literature and reading that was waning a bit, I think,” says Julee Morris, owner of Once Upon a Story in Long Beach, Calif.
Even her 15-year-old daughter is caught up in the series, Morris says: “It parallels their lives a little bit – the school issue and the demons to fight.”