Bookplanet: the last Harry Potter is almost upon us

Harry Potter’s Final Act Is Set for July 21-- by MOTOKO RICH and JULIE BOSMAN/NY Times

J. K. Rowling, the author of the record-setting Harry Potter books, announced yesterday that the seventh — and last — installment in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be published on July 21.

That will be just eight days after the release of the film version of the fifth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” promising a huge summer for fans of the young wizard.

Millions of fans around the world are fiercely anticipating the final installment. But the end of the series, in which Ms. Rowling has hinted she may kill off one of the main characters, comes as a bittersweet finale not only for readers but also for the publishing companies, booksellers and licensees that have cashed in on the international phenomenon since it began more than nine years ago with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

It is hard to imagine how the publishing industry will ever replace the sensation that spawned midnight parties and all-night lines to get the books the moment they went on sale. When “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.

For this final installment the cover price will rise to $34.99, from $29.99 for the previous volume, although many retailers are offering substantial discounts, often as high as 40 percent. Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, Ms. Rowling’s American publisher, said the company had kept the cover price of the series the same since 2003. “Since that time, clearly, the prices have gone up for production, for paper, for gas, for distribution and security, and this reflects the increase,” she said.

Scholastic, which represents about 37 percent of Harry’s global books in print, is clearly in the hot seat as it prepares for life after the boy wizard. “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 its own a new Harry Potter title has the power to juice up sales significantly, not just at Scholastic but throughout the industry. (On the London Stock Exchange, the announcement of the new book’s publication date by Bloomsbury, Ms. Rowling’s British publisher, sent its shares up 2.2 percent. Scholastic’s stock price was virtually unchanged at the end of Thursday’s trading.) 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 from $1.36 billion. 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 books, which have 121.5 million copies in print in the United States 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.

Richard Robinson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, is quick to emphasize that despite the outsize attention that Ms. Rowling and her series attracts, it is not the pillar holding up the company. He said that even in a record year like 2005, when sales of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” generated about $175 million in revenues, that was about 13 percent of the company’s book sales and only 8 percent of Scholastic’s total revenues, which include income from educational publishing, children’s television programming, DVDs, computer software and its international division.

He pointed out that industry observers had questioned Scholastic’s survival after the decline of other wildly successful series from the publisher, like Goosebumps and the Baby-Sitters Club. Each of those series has more books in print than all the Harry Potter books combined. Coming projects include a new series by Ann M. Martin, author of the Baby-Sitters Club titles, more books from Cornelia Funke, the best-selling German fantasy writer, and a new sort of junior chick-lit series, “Candy Apple,” for 9- and 10-year old girls.

Scholastic has signed a multibook contract with Meg Cabot, the author of “The Princess Diaries” and “All-American Girl,” Ms. Holton said on Thursday. Ms. Cabot is writing a series for younger girls that will be introduced in spring of 2008.

When the company announced first-quarter results in September, analysts noted that while sales in the book unit were down by half because of the absence of a new Harry Potter title this year, sales of other books were up 19 percent.

Ms. Holton added that 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 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” Ms. Rowling.

In the years following the publication of the final Harry Potter title, Mr. Greco predicts that growth in revenue for children’s books overall will decline from double digits in Harry years to the low single digits.

Stephen Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said that within seconds of yesterday’s announcement, pre-order sales drove “Deathly Hallows” to the No. 1 spot on bn.com. It was also number one Friday on Amazon’s sales list.

Mr. Riggio said that while Harry had provided a strong boost to sales, he was not concerned about the end of the franchise. Like Ms. Holton he said, “it will be with us for our entire lifetime and beyond.” What’s more, he said, even though sales of a new Harry title were significant in the month they came out, over all, they represented less than 1 per cent of total annual sales.

And it may be that some booksellers never made that much profit from Harry Potter anyway. “If we sell the book at 40 percent off, I don’t think we’re making that much money,” Mr. Riggio said. Constance Sayre, principal of Market Partners International, a consultant to the publishing industry in New York, said, “The competing amongst the chain stores and the warehouse clubs for discount probably limited their profits enormously.”

And the end of the Harry Potter series is not the most pressing problem facing publishers of books for children and young adults; competition from other forms of entertainment is the real threat. “When you look now at an 8- or 10-year-old, they are truly online, they are IM-ing their friends, they are text-messaging, they have an iPod where they are watching and listening to music,” said Susan Miller, president of Mixed Media Group, which develops books, television shows and movies for children. “They have a lot of other ways to spend their time, media-wise, and if you like to consume stories you can be watching something on the television. There are a lot of places for them to be entertained.”

Still, there’s always this possibility: Ms. Rowling could just write another series. “At some point she’ll come out of retirement and pull a Michael Jordan,” said Mr. Searby of J. P. Morgan.