Can Scholastic Really Move 2.5 Million Harry Potter Books? Film Spillover by the Numbers:
how many of those moviegoers will be inspired to buy books remains a question. Scholastic acknowledged earlier this month that 2.5 million copies of the most recent book in the series remain unsold, playing down a suggestion by London daily the Independent that the 13.5 million copy print run was a miscalculation. At the time the publisher said that the new film would boost sales, keeping returns manageable.Scholastic’s predictions are at least partly supported by a look at sales data from Nielsen BookScan, collected directly before and after the release of the previous Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which had an only slightly more modest opening weekend of $93.7 million in June, 2004. The opening led to a noticeable boost in sales for the entire series, the greatest increase coming for the Prisoner book. Paperback sales, having hovered between 2,000 and 3,000 copies for much of the year hit 6,000 for the week just before the film’s release. Sales peaked in the week after the opening at 9,000 copies. Hardcover sales saw a significant uptick as well, selling 2,000 copies in the week before the opening, after posting weekly totals below 1,000 for much of the year. They climbed to 3,000 copies in the week that followed the opening.
But while the data suggests Goblet the movie will help its corresponding book, which sold 7,000 copies in paperback last week, it offers fewer assurances with respect to Scholastic’s hopes for Half-Blood. When last year’s film was released, sales for what was then the newest Potter book, the hardcover edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, climbed, but not as dramatically as they did for Prisoner. In fact, the 5,000 copies sold for the week before the release was comparable to previous performance that year—the book had sold at least 5,000 copies for 11 of previous 21 full weeks. The magnitude of the increase was also less significant in the week following the release, with 9,000 copies sold.