Wednesday, August 01, 2007
A Blog About…Harry Potter, Of Course
byAs most avid Harry Potter fans are currently finishing (or have already finished) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the 7th and final book in the wildly popular series, I’m about 200 pages into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix— book number five. Yes, you heard right, I’m only on the 5th book. You see, Harry Potter and I had a little falling out the last time I tried to read book five back in 2003 when it was first released. To put it frankly, I just got bored.
I tried my best to stick with the plot of the 870 page novel, but I gave up. Not only had I given up on the book, but I thought I had lost interest in the entire series. I didn’t even notice when the sixth book came out in 2005, and I definitely wasn’t lined up at Barnes and Noble last Friday waiting for my own copy of book seven. I had abandoned ship, until now—thanks to some word of mouth marketing.
Like I said, I thought I was too cool to read Harry Potter books, let alone blog about them. But here I am, writing about Harry Potter, waiting anxiously for the moment I leave Sundog to go home and immerse myself in the book. So what changed?
It could be the fact that Mr. Potter had a very exciting July. With the release of a new movie and a new book within 10 days of each other, media coverage of the boy wizard was at an all-time high. On July 11th, Warner Brothers premiered Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the film based on author J.K. Rowling’s fifth book. The movie made $44.2 million in a single day (the 5th highest total in one-day history), and raked in $568.4 million worldwide during its first 15 days in theaters. On July 21st, the highly anticipated final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released. It sold over 11 million copies within the first 24 hours of it’s was release—shattering all previous records and becoming the fastest selling book ever. Pretty impressive.
Thanks to some good PR and extensive advertising of Harry Potter, he made some big money last month. The hype surrounding HP was nuts, but I don’t believe it influenced my revived interest in the series. No, what really got me was some good old-fashioned peer pressure—something we in the business like to call word of mouth marketing. Many of my friends are freaky Potter fans. You could call them extreme brand loyalists. One of them re-read the first six books this summer in order to refresh his memory and prepare for the seventh. I heard another begging someone to go to the newest movie with her, as it had been out for 4 days and she still hadn’t seen it. Suddenly, everyone around me had a renewed case of Harry Potter fever, and I found myself wondering if I had made a mistake in giving up on him. My best friend urged me to give it another shot. “These books are going to be such a big part of our generation’s culture,” she said. “Won’t you want to read them to your kids someday?”
Hmm…I suppose. My friends’ marketing of Harry Potter had a tremendous impact on me. Which is why that very day, I grabbed book five from my bookshelf, dusted it off, and cracked it open. I’m not making any promises…but I’ve already been asking a few people if I can borrow their copy of book six once I finish this one. So I guess I’m back in the game.
