So Scholastic invested in a lovely hardcover design for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with a soon-to-be iconic cover, even though conventional wisdom of the time held that children’s books only made money in paperback. That budget is structured so that elevating the numbers in one category means elevating the numbers in the next category: If you’re going to invest $105,000 just in acquiring a book, you’re also going to pour extra money into marketing, publicity, and production, so that you have a reasonable chance of making that money back. Whenever a publisher acquires a book, it creates a budget for that book. It was a curiosity, and as such, it was a story. Reviewers wanted to know what kind of book would justify that kind of money. The hook came from the press: Newspapers featured articles about the little English book that had garnered such a huge sale. The $105,000 sale granted Harry Potter two things: a built-in publicity hook, and a big budget. The first Harry Potter book wasn’t perfect, but it was magic But it only started to approach phenomenon levels when Scholastic bought the US publication rights for an astonishing $105,000, about 10 times more than the average foreign rights sale at the time. Harry Potter did fine when it first emerged in the UK 20 years ago, winning a Smarties Award and garnering respectable sales for its publisher, Bloomsbury. Harry Potter’s US publication made it a bonafide phenomenon Here’s a look back at the way Harry Potter changed and influenced online fandom, millennial culture, and the publishing industry.
And it introduced an entire generation to the idea that it’s possible to interact with the pop culture you love - to write about it and with it, to make music and art about it, and to build a business around it. It changed the business model for publishing books for kids. Harry Potter made YA book-to-movie franchises into one of the biggest forces in pop culture. Rowling was an unknown single mom when she first got the idea for her story while stuck on a train the small UK children’s press that ultimately took a chance on it undoubtedly couldn’t have predicted that it would have a measurable effect on everything it touched. But Harry Potter changed the world.Īuthor J.K.
Harry Potter has since became such an all-encompassing phenomenon that from this vantage point, it’s hard to see the full scope what it accomplished: It feels as though publishing and fandom and children’s literature and all of pop culture have always been the way we know them today. Almost exactly 20 years ago, on September 1, 1998, Scholastic published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first US edition of the UK’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
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