Harry Potter and the Great Big Hoopla

This week a tsunami of marketing and merchandise will wash over bookstores, billboards, baseball stadiums and every possible form of media -- a tsunami by the name of Harry Potter.

On June 21, at 12:01am, the much-anticipated fifth book in J.K. Rowling's immensely popular series goes on sale. And when it does, its cover will be beamed from a billboard in Times Square while Harry Potter lookalikes hand out a million stickers and badges. The international jet set will attend a $500,000 release party in London. And all this for a book -- not for a movie, nor for anything having to do with J-Lo. But of course, Harry Potter is officially no longer simply a character in a book. He is a one-boy, multi-million dollar, international brand and media property.

The book itself has been kept under tight security, held under a strict embargo until the moment of release. Reviewers don't get copies; bookstores face harsh penalties if they disobey. The boxes of the precious tomes have been arriving at stores sealed in opaque black plastic wrap, labeled with a 1-800 number to call if the seal has been broken.

Reportedly only five people in the world have read the story, plus maybe one fork lift operator in the UK who found a couple of copies that fell off a truck. Evidently he offered pages to The Sun newspaper for £25,000. He was promptly nabbed and sentenced to 180 hours community service. That incident seems to be the lone breach. Headmaster Dumbledore would be proud. Heck, the Department of Homeland Security must be green with envy.

The tight security comes from orders on high; the author herself supposedly wanted to make sure no one spoiled the surprise for her young readers. Of course, the tactic is also a brilliant marketing ploy, like creating a line outside a club. The suspense is building. What will it matter what the critics say, once the tension breaks and everyone is awash in all things Potter?

A Critic-Proof Potion

Critics? Does anyone really read book reviews anymore? Certainly as far as sales are concerned, it may not matter much at all what's between the covers of this fifth Potter installment. The book has already turned the publishing world on its head and entered a mass market that books rarely reach. The usual book world sales tactics simply don't apply. Rowling is more famous than any other author who could possibly write her a cover blurb, and it seems safe to assume that most Harry Potter fans don't give a damn what the New York Review of Books has to say about Hogwarts. As long as Rowling hands us some reasonable facsimile of the previous four books -- Harry must be endearing, Hermione clever and Voldemort evil and defeated -- the record 8.5 million copies printed in the first run will probably find homes. Orders on Amazon.com have already topped a million. Brand loyalty is high.

No matter what goes on inside Potter's delightful world, out here in the land of the dollar, Harry Potter the brand is en route to ever more massive "mindshare," as they say. The question is, what does brand loyalty do to the imagination? Are mass market brands and creative storylines really compatible? The millions of dollars being spent on Potter marketing and merchandise are intended to create loyalty to a happy symbol of magic and innocence. Will that enormous financial pressure jibe with character development? Any criticism of the Harry Potter phenomenon is inevitably dismissed as cranky or snobbish. "At least they're reading," goes the comeback, and it's true. But what they're reading still matters, and a brand is by definition reductive and oversimplified, a single note, while a character is a melody, complex and multilayered. It would be a shame if the real world pressure to sell Cokes were to creep into Harry Potter's world, if the pressure to be a brand kept Harry from taking risks as a character.