Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Harry Potter and The End of the Cash Cow

You may recall that we spend some time in class talking about the advantages of a pre-publication sale of your book. Not only does it give you some money to help pay for printing costs, it also gets the buzz started.

Well, the latest Harry Potter book is being pre-sold (like it needs help creating a buzz). The book is due out this summer. If you place an order now, the retail price is discounted 46%. So, I asked about the retail price and discovered it is $64.79! That means the pre-publication price is $34.99. Wow!!!

Hope all the kids who enjoy the Harry Potter books have a second job.

I suppose the author, who is listed as a billionaire, wants to get the maximum revenue from the book--particularly since she swears that this is the last in the series. Maybe it is the publisher who wants to make one more killing before the whole thing goes away while not putting out any money for printing. Whatever the case, the consumer is really paying the price.

And the publishing houses wonder why sales have been flat.

3 comments:

dkgoodman said...

Nice to know. Thanks!

Poor Harry Potter

Staff said...

Thanks for the comment. I am constantly amazed at how the price of books increases while the qquality decreases at the publishing houses. I suspect that we are going to see an greater demand for self published books, simply because the quality is there.

Staff said...

My bad!!! I thought kids would want the deluxe version. Imagine settling for a non-deluxe version for only $34.95.