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The Phoenix breaks records
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HASAN SUROOR reflects on the frenzy surrounding the release of the fifth Harry Potter in London.
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REUTERS
IN the din, nobody quite got Emily's full name and she simply became the clever little girl who snapped up the first copy of the new Harry Potter book at a Central London bookstore. As a TV reporter thrust a microphone in her face and photographers urged her to hold the book up to the cameras, Emily became, for that brief moment, the public face of the Potter-mania sweeping Britain. For months, Harry Potter has been the only show in town thanks to a worldwide media hype that often saw facts make way for fiction.
If hype was ever laid so thick, this was it. The build-up to the book's dramatic midnight launch on June 21 was unprecedented in the history of modern publishing, and of a kind that greater writers than Rowling would have died for. And by the time the book arrived — "delivered" was the preferred word — anyone worthy of a copy knew everything there was to know about it: its size, its weight, the exact number of its pages, its print-run, and even bits of the plot which Rowling herself let out as part of a well-choreographed campaign two days before the launch. And "28-and-a-half-hours" before the launch, the BBC's most famous interviewer and presenter Jeremy Paxman was wheeled out to extract a host of tantalising secrets from Rowling, including, incredibly, a hint that Harry Potter may not survive the seventh and the last instalment of the series. The same evening the BBC's high-brow, touch-me-not current affairs programme "Newsnight" featured a discussion on the Potter phenomenon, and as the mania gripped the nation newspapers went to town with Potter "exclusives" which ended up saying more of the same thing.
The launch itself was a riot. It was intended to be one, and the strategy worked. In a marketing ploy, which was bizarre even by Potter standards, just when the pubs were closing down bookstores across Britain were opening their doors to sleepy children, many of whom had been queuing up for hours to buy a copy. Little kids, who should have been in bed at that unearthly hour, were instead struggling to keep their place in the queue — all because a manufactured hysteria led them to believe that if they were not part of the crowd they were not in the same "class" and were missing out on a profound experience. The peer pressure, created by media hype, forced hundreds of children to rush out to the nearest bookstore at midnight when, left to their own devices, they would have enjoying a good night's sleep. But there were also some gritty souls who refused to fall into the trap. The Guardian tracked down one of them. Emma Arden, 11, found the whole nocturnal drama a bit silly. "I think queuing up at midnight is a bit excessive. It isn't the end of the world, if you don't get one book or you get it a bit late... I also think if they are releasing it for children then they should do it during the day, instead of in the middle of the night... If it hadn't been for the publicity then I don't think Harry Potter would have become such a big thing," she said. Parents complained that children were becoming victims of an aggressive marketing culture, which thrived on generating peer pressure, and made it impossible for impressionable minds to think of themselves outside the herd. Despite the phenomenal interest in the Potter series — the first four books sold nearly 200 million copies in 200 countries — there is nothing to suggest that it has significantly changed children's reading habits; or that children are reading more than they did before Harry Potter came on the scene. What we do know, however, is that with clever packaging even fantasy can be turned into a multi-million pound industry in the name of children's literature. And that's what Harry Potter is all about.
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