Harry Potter and the hype

BY shivam vij| IN Media Practice | 07/07/2003

Shivam Vij

Some months ago Outlook featured a book called "Yadav: A Roadside Love Story" (Penguin India), written by Jill Lowe, a 65-year-old British lady who visited Delhi and fell in love and married a taxi driver named Lal Singh Yadav. Yadav had hoped Jill`s book on their 13-year romance would buy them a Qualis car, the story said, but it "earned them less than a day`s trip to Red Fort".

This report in Outlook was followed by articles and interviews on the book in other publications. India Today also reviewed it. Some weeks later the book was found on the bestseller list of a newspaper.

The lesson is simple: the media can make or mar an author. A journalist turned publisher tells me that his publishing company can do well because his years in journalism and his contacts in the profession will ensure publicity for his books. He also told me that he doesn’t mind if people read the books he will publish; what matters is that they should buy them! And only good media coverage can ensure this.

So, here’s a chicken and egg question: what came first, the Harry Potter series’ success or the hype that made them successful?

Every time a Potter book comes out, our newspapers go "potty" over it and then they report that the public is "going potty over Potter". (The headline writers are fond of alliteration. ‘Potty over Potter’, for the uninitiated, is to be madly in love with the Potter books, movies, merchandise and what not.)

First the papers tell you that such-and-such days are left for the fifth Potter book ("HP5"), ‘Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix’ to be released, and we are all dying for D-Day. This serves to create an initial interest. This is followed by reports that a character close to Potter is being killed in this book, and how many tears JK Rowling shed when she killed that character, that Rowling is already richer than the Queen of England, that so many millions of copies have already been ordered all over the world, of which such-and-such million copies have been ordered through Amazon, that the book will be released in London one minute past midnight... And hold your breath, when D-Day arrives, this is the top story of the day.

A Penguin press release had already informed journalists that "Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix is the fastest-selling book in history outselling its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." It also said sales in India had touched the roof as well. Penguin CEO David Davidar was quoted in the release, "This extraordinary phenomenon is a handsome tribute to the hold Ms Rowling has on readers in India." Or is it? Is it Rowling’s merit alone that her books are outselling all previous bestsellers in India? Has the media hype, partly a result of Penguin’s hard sell and partly of the international hype, no role to play in it?

It was only a little surprising then that the Hindustan Times on Sunday, 22 June, gave half of its front page to the earth-shattering event of HP5’s release. The story, headlined "It`s got to be magic: Harry Potter sales hit the roof here", carried a three column picture of "JK Rowling with a copy of her fifth book..." This is how the bylined story begins, sounding more like a copywriter`s punch-line than a newspaper report: "Sold out! Stock`s running out fast!" You are told how the book was launched in India, UK, US, New Zealand and Australia.

The Harry Potter phenomenon keeps getting bigger. It is a lesson in marketing that a good work of popular children’s fiction is being so over-hyped that you would be forgiven to believe that William Shakespeare derived his inspiration from JK Rowling’s books. And it is a lesson in how globalisation has arrived that Indian papers have become willing participants in this international marketing strategy. But why have they? The answer is not hard to fathom. What we are seeing here is the height of market-driven journalism. The papers think their readers want something light and peppy to attract young readers. So Harry Potter also helps the newspaper; it is a symbiotic relationship.

"Harry puts the publishing industry in party mood," beamed The Economic Times. Even the serious Hindu had to succumb to the pressure: an agency report told us, amongst other things, how Rowling had already begun work on HP6 despite her pregnancy. The Asian Age seemed to do a very sensible thing by giving the event over half the space on its last page; there were too many newsworthy stories for P1.

Time magazine did a cover story, and so did our Outlook. Greater hype around Harry Potter should help parent company Time Warner because they are the ones who produce the Harry Potter movies. The Outlook story gave us a primer on the Potter vocabulary and quoted a bespectacled nine-year-old as claiming that he had read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban more than 20 times! And we thought reading habits were on a decline amongst Indian children.

Which brings us to the first defence of Pottermania: it’s good that commercialism is promoting reading. Amrita Shah wrote in The Indian Express, wonders, "Why is it assumed that it is such a terrible thing for children not to read? Times change and who would have the inclination for books with all the seductive new interactive media around?" To be sure, this is not to judge the Potter books themselves. Shah wrote: "Certainly the books are charming and their world delightfully evocative but are we truly so devoid of talent that just one and only one book can slake the thirst of the world and all its children?"

Pottermaniacs, and there are too many of them, defend the media, saying that Harry Potter is really good enough to get half a page. Of course, how would they know if an equally good or better work of fiction was ever written, because their newspaper never told them about anything other than Harry Potter. Indian papers hardly pay lip-service to literature. The Times of India — in which the legendary editor Sham Lal used to write his famous column Life and Letters many deadlines ago — does not cover books because it believes that people don’t read books. There has been no major change in strategy, just that they have started promoting the pop-psychology You-Can-Win genre of books.

On D-day itself, a special report, "Potter and his poor Indian cousins," tucked away on Page 13 of the HT, was a refreshing change. Ironically, the report asked, "Is media the villain?" Arundhati Deosthale of children’s publisher Scholastic was quoted as saying that Indian books don’t get "a quarter of the space Harry Potter gets. The media doesn’t even bother to review Indian books." Moreover, literary critics are now doubting whether the Potter books are really masterpieces of literature or mere page-turning sensations?

Unlike the HT, The Times of India considered the news of Mayawati’s order to stop construction near the Taj Mahal, important enough to be the lead story on June 22. But "Hurrah! Harry Potter creates a hungama" still occupied the largest space on Page One. The reporter hurriedly went through the 766 pages of HP5 and told us, in great detail, the significant events that take place in the book.(A spoilsport thing to do actually—reveal the story.) This includes: Harry couldn’t become a prefect in his boarding school; The Order of The Phoenix is a secret society to save Harry from Voldemort the villain; Harry has become an aggressive teenager; Harry is falli ng in love; Harry faces expulsion from school... this is frontpage news in the twenty first century. And we thought today’s journalists had stopped reading books!

A Page 4 report in TOI (a front page story wasn’t enough) said that Delhites "braved the rain to grab their piece of Rowling’s magical world". The Hindustan Times also said that sales were hitting the roof, not just in Delhi but also in other metros. The Indian Express had a well-written P1 anchor to herald the arrival of HP5 in Mumbai. But their Delhi Newsline supplement reported that there wasn’t so much rush in Delhi after all. "Discount is the only magic for selling Harry Potter," it said. "Those who didn’t offer discounts sold only 15-30 copies." A Connaught Place bookseller was quoted as saying that the rains had kept people away.

So whom do we believe? Was there a great rush? "I`d believe none of them, frankly," says literary critic Nilanjana S. Roy. "The Potter books have sold steadily in India without touching off the desperate response of fans in the West; HP5 is likely to do the same thing. I think it will eventually sell its 60,000 copies, which depending on whom you ask in the publishing industry is a Major Deal in India — or a drop in the ocean compared to the amount Potter sells elsewhere." While Roy is all praise for Rowling’s books, she is dismayed that Harry Potter, the trademark, had been "taken over by corporate interests in just the same way that Disney had usurped Pooh or Sleeping Beauty".

The Harry Potter phenomenon is also another example of commodification of youth, discussed earlier in a Hoot story. The over-dose of Potter coverage forces yet another stereotype on youth. You are made to feel that if you don’t read Harry Potter you are behind the times. This becomes a peer pressure issue and leaves no room for individuality.

Harry Potter’s appeal is not limited to children. Bloomsbury, its publishers in the UK discovered that adults were reading them secretly because they would be embarrassed to be singled out reading children’s books. So they decided to print two different covers for the book: one for children and a serious cover for the ‘adult edition’. This confirms our worst fears that the book is being judged by its cover, and the judge in this case is your newspaper.

Time will decide whether the Harry Potter books are classics in the strict literary meaning, but the media coverage of Harry Potter is already a classic in the history of trivialisation.

Further reading:

Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life by Jennie Bristow

Pottermania on the Weekend by Nilanjana S. Roy

Shivam Vij is an undergraduate student who refuses to learn what a ‘muggle’ is. Contact: shivamvij@hotmail.com