Rowling's wish for magic

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 14, 2012

The higher they climb the harder they fall. So how terrifying to have reached the very peak of success - and then to take another chance.

I don't normally extend a great deal of pity to billionaires, I figure they have their own protection already. But let's spare a moment's thought for J.K. Rowling.

Can Jo Rowling stand up without Harry? Should she care?

Yes she has had vast success both literary - selling half a billion Harry Potter books in 73 languages in ten years - and commercial, from books on Quidditch to eight blockbuster movies that smashed every attendance record. And she has received her share of glory including an OBE, the Legion d'Honneur and the Hans Christian Andersen Award among others.

But what does she do next, five years after Harry's farewell? She wants to write an adult "literary fiction" novel - can she afford to fail?

We will find out on the 27th of this month when The Casual Vacancy will be published world-wide. Will she be acclaimed as a great author after all, or as someone who cannot write above the level of a teenage mind-set? There is a lot of pride riding on this.

From the marketing point of view, international publishing group Hachette have a difficult job. The obvious route is to declare, "At last a new book from J.K. Rowling", blast the news across billboards and TV, and sell millions of copies on the spot. You can see the media buyer's twitching fingers reaching for the keyboard.

But this is not what Jo Rowling wants. The whole launch has been played to a minimum, almost smothered. You'll find a few little placards in bookshops and on the web there is a 120-word synopsis that vaguely talks about events in a quiet English village. Sounds like an episode of Midsomer Murders.

Nevertheless, the publishers have still signed off on a print run of two million, but this is small beer compared to what could be achieved with a little push.

However, marketing has not been totally neglected. For the first time, a Rowling work will be released as an e-book simultaneously. Anyone who has glanced around while strap-hanging on the morning commute will know about the spectacular growth in the use of e-books.

The Pew Research Institute this year showed e-book readership had increased from 17 to 21 per cent of American adults in less than six months. By my observation, we may be growing even faster.

For marketing purposes it gives them the perfect demographic - 34 per cent of these readers are 29 or younger, in other words, the youths who spent their teens lapping up Harry Potter.

So all is ready: the book is written, the warehouses are full, the date is set, we all have to wait for the result - for a book that has been tightly restricted to a few dozen eyes so far.

Her publishing house director, Heather Fain, declared that: "In a lot of ways, we want to think of her as a new author." It's set in the real world, "It's about relationships and how families interact. There is a lot of meat to it," she said.

There are bound to be many reviewers who love it, and many who take the scalpel to it - that's the nature of criticism.

But Ms Rowling should perhaps remember the words of Joseph Heller, author of one of the greatest books of the past century, when he was told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22.

Heller thought, nodded, and then responded: "Who has?"

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com