Spontaneous Musings

The Harry Potter postings on my flist are making me laugh. In a recent article booksellers and book publishers were bemoaning finding the next Potter phenomena. See - the trick isn't finding a book kids will love. The trick is finding a book that kids and adults will love. That's why it was a phenomena - it hit a broad spectrum - not just kids, not just adults, not just the elderly and not just one culture, gender, or ethnicity. But everyone. You find a way to make a product that a BROAD range of people obsess over and your golden. It isn't easy to do and often just blind luck. If it wasn't, there would be a lot more multi-millionaires out there.

Oh - a tidbit to anyone who thinks Potter hurts bookstores or publishing. It doesn't.
Looong time ago, when I first moved to NYC, I had a rather enlightening little chat
with Random House Senior Editor Robert Loomis - who had optioned John Grishom and worked with Emily Praeger - the author of A Visit to the Footbinders, and Eve's Tatooe (she's sisinlaw's pseudo step-mother - yes, Six Degrees and is the reason I got to chat with him.) Loomis told me that the only reason Random House could afford to put out Emily's book was Grishom's sales. Books like Harry Potter and The Firm make it possible for publishing houses to publish literary novels that get a smaller readership and they often take a loss on. Same with booksellers.

People come in to buy the best-seller or the Harry Potter, but they are there. Looking around. Looking at the other books. Thinking, hmmmm, that one looks cool. And they pick them up. A kid falls in love with Harry, the series is over, and hunts another book to replace it, so say picks up Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
That's what happened to me with Narnia and Nancy Drew.

Writers and booksellers who scoff at popular books like Harry, forget that's what brings in people to buy theirs. It's Marketing and Advertising 101. You piggy-up on the leader.
Thank Potter for making it possible for smaller lesser known works to get out there.

I did buy Harry today. Went to the indie first - it was charging 34.50 for the book. Uhm, no. Not when I know I could get it for 20 or 17 or something elsewhere. Yes, the price wars hurt the indies, but that's not the fault of Harry Potter - that's Capitalism and supply and demand. So off I go to Barnes and Nobles - yep, 22.50. Much cheaper. And yes, that's why indies call it the evil book store. It wasn't crowded. Went right up to the cashier, leisurely asked for the book, didn't wait in any lines, didn't have to worry about getting a copy. Easy.

Now it sits on my bookshelf where I can pick it up at my leisure.

Oh also picked up Spike - Shadow Puppets. Which looks cool. Thank you, Brian Lynch, for enabling my Spike addiction. If you'd been a bad writer and they'd hired George Jeanty to do your books, it may have died a nice and normal death. But nooo. Frank Urruh is doing them and you rock. Damn.

James Marsters fans? He's supposed to appear in the second episode of Holly Hunter's new series Saving Grace or so I heard. Playing an oil man who may have committed murder. Soo, you do not have to wait until January to see the man act again - you can catch him the week following this one, on TNT. It's right after the Closer.

Off to eat and watch Breach via netflix. Or maybe my favorite summer show.
It's not what you'd expect and no on my flist appears to be watching it.

Bet you can't guess what it is? I'd give you a hint but that would be cheating. But I'll do this much - you are not watching it. OR rather if you are, you never really mentioned it and if you did mention it? I missed it. Not that anyone's going to guess - 80% of my flist is busy devouring Harry Potter. I'll probably have to avoid my flist for the next two weeks until they finish posting reviews on it. Then scroll back to read them after I finish reading the book.