J.K. Rowling works her magic again at Amazon
The Harry Potter hype begins. In two days, Amazon.com Inc. issued two press releases touting the magnitude of pre-orders it had received for the seventh—and last—book in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," to be published in July.
Publisher Scholastic Corp. announced the publication date yesterday (July 21) and Amazon announced that in the first seven hours of availability, it had sold over 200% more books than it did the entire first day for the previous book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."
Then today, Amazon announced that first-day pre-orders were 547% higher than first-day pre-orders for "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."
Amazon, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, reports it sold more copies of the seventh book on the first day than the company did of book six in the first two weeks of the pre-order period.
Amazon received more than 1.5 million advance orders of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," which was released in July 2005. Amazon reports that since it posted the detail page for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" late last year, hundreds of thousands of customers have signed up for e-mail notifications announcing the pre-order availability.
Barnes & Noble.com, No. 30 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, is not issuing numbers, but a spokeswoman says, “Within seconds of the publication date being announced yesterday, the book went to No. 1 on our site.”
Back...
