Fifth Potter proves good storytelling still sells

At the moment, praising Harry Potter seems a bit like rhapsodizing over a particularly lavish sunset -- rather beside the point.

The sun, after all, will traverse its appointed course with or without witnesses and will set as nature dictates, indifferent to our delight or dismay. But while the raw dimensions of the Potter phenomenon sometimes suggest a force of nature, it is most definitely the product of something wonderfully human: the storytelling genius of author J.K. Rowling and the unadulterated joy that tens of millions of people have found in her work.

That’s why -- beyond all the dollars and the dazzle -- last weekend’s publication of the fifth volume of Rowling’s projected seven-book sequence, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” is worth not only celebrating, but also pondering.

Consider:

For the first time since people began to take notice of such things and to count, a widely anticipated book and a highly publicized film, “The Hulk” -- both, coincidentally from the young people’s fantasy genre -- went head-to-head over an opening weekend.

Harry cleaned the Hulk’s clock, though the film was hardly a bomb. In fact, its $62.6 million in ticket sales over three days gave it the most successful June opening in the history of Hollywood.

But on Saturday alone, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” sold 5 million copies at prices ranging from $29.99 -- the cover figure -- to $17 in the big-box discounters. In that one day, it not only eclipsed all other literary sales records, but also sold nearly twice as many copies as John Grisham’s “The Summons,” the top-selling hardcover book for all of 2002.

According to the British press, Rowling already is Britain’s richest woman with a Potter-propelled personal fortune of around $500 million, which exceeds the one Queen Elizabeth II inherited from a long line of Hanoverian acquirers. By collecting a standard royalty of 15% on the cover price of every book sold Saturday, the author increased her worth by $22.5 million. In those 24 hours, she almost certainly earned more than all the living Nobel literature laureates did together last year.

How important is Harry Potter to Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic Corp., which writhed in public agony while the author labored to complete Volume 5?

As the United States’ leading publisher of children’s books, whose volumes can be found in 80% of the country’s grammar school classrooms, Scholastic has been having a dismal year. It lost $500,000 on flat sales of $434 million in the third quarter and is expected to report what stock analysts -- even the honest ones -- call “lackluster” results for the fiscal year that ended May 31.

But with an unprecedented first printing of 8.5 million hardcover copies and a promotional budget of $4 million, the consensus is that “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” will generate at least $120 million in additional revenue for Scholastic this year, which amounts to roughly 17% of the publisher’s projected earnings.

That’s on top of the $500 million Harry Potter has earned Scholastic since 1997, when the company purchased the U.S. rights to Rowling’s first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” for $105,000. Combined, the series’ first four volumes have sold a stunning 80 million copies.

In fact, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” has arrived just as the children’s book business appeared headed for another economic trough. According to the Assn. of American Publishers, sales of hardcover books for young readers were down 23% from last year during the first four months of 2003. Paperbacks were down nearly 5%.

Harry will single-handedly change all that, since sales of the most recent volume are expected to reignite interest in the series’ first four volumes.

The most heartening thing about all this is that the Harry Potter books are so resolutely old-fashioned. These are the kind of great big bookish books that adult readers will recall from their own childhoods.

Part of the series’ success, in fact, comes from what they call in the movie business its crossover effect. While the majority of Rowling’s readers are children and adolescents, a substantial number of adults are unapologetic Harry fans.

Part of Rowling’s storytelling genius is that she has daringly confronted the primary peril of most literary series geared to young people by refusing to freeze her characters in time.

With each volume, Harry and his companions age along with his readers. This bit of narrative daring has not only made for a richer, more rewarding sequence, but also guaranteed that the audience will expand with each successive volume -- and that generations to come can enter and mature along with Potter and his cohorts.

All of this works so brilliantly because, against all odds, Rowling has yet to produce a volume that disappoints either her readers or the critics. Given the pressure under which she now must work, that is an achievement of creative discipline and self-possession every bit as amazing as her sales.

All these things seem somewhat obvious -- or at least apparent -- in retrospect. But it’s worth recalling that Rowling’s first Potter book was rejected by one main-line publisher after another: too strange, too long, too conventional, too weird, too old-fashioned, too long.

How consoling it must be for every momentarily disappointed novelist to imagine that, somewhere in the bucolic reaches of the Home Counties, there is a quiet private hospital in which a very special support group now regularly meets. Its shattered, Prozac-stabilized participants all are there for the same reason -- they are the editors who rejected Harry Potter.

“It’s not my fault. I had a migraine that day.”

“Oh, stop your whining, you’ve been giving us all headaches since you came here.”

“I actually loved it, but .... “

In fact, if you search for the secret of Rowling’s success, you have to go beyond the marketing and the sales figures and look to the alchemy that occurs when the talent of a single writer transmutes the base metals of sentence and syntax into something more precious than gold -- a great story.

Fearful and, increasingly, demoralized, too many book publishers have begun to doubt that great stories can, on their own, find an audience or that there really is much of an audience that still wants to find its stories in books.

Rowling’s greatest achievement may be that she has decisively reminded the publishing industry that -- cinema and television and video and cyber space notwithstanding -- the book is still a mass medium.