There is no Harry Potter. He is a fictitious character. However, the boy wizard, the main character of a box-office hit book, has more fans than any other real person.
Ever since last week, the little wizard has been embodied by a real-life boy, in a movie that grossed almost 100 million dollars last weekend, which money will go to AOL Time Warner accounts, the multinational holding exclusive movie rights for the best-selling books.
The Harry Potter mania, generated by a focused marketing campaign, has reached Romania lately as well.
Egmont Publishing House, which owns exclusive distribution rights for the Harry Potter series in Romania, has already sold 26,000 copies of the three volumes published so far, while a book that manages to sell 2,000 copies is usually deemed as a big hit.
"Two days after the launch, we received calls from the readers, asking us when we were planning to publish the next volume, which goes to show that these books are selling like crazy," says Claudiu Marin, Egmont sales manager.
The publishing house is the Romanian subsidiary of a Danish multinational and launched the first volume in the series ("Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone") last December, while the other two volumes came out in February and September this year.
"Each volume secures sales for the next ones. Demand increased gradually and I hope it will keep up the pace," Marin says.
Considering the price of the first two volumes (59,000 and 79,000 ROL) and the 20-30% discount granted to distributors, the publishing house is likely to have gained about 1.2 billion ROL so far. "I believe the books will account for 10-15% of our sales for this year, which is a smash hit for us," Marin added.
But who is Harry Potter? He is a ten year-old boy, who was admitted at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, while his creator, J.K. Rowling has earned 26 million dollars from broadcasting rights alone.
More than 100 million copies of the first four volumes of the series had been sold until August, while the first big-screen adventure of the boy wizard, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," cast a magical spell on moviegoers, grossing an estimated $93.5 million in the first three days after its release.
Sales are big for the Romanian market, but they are insignificant as compared to the craze in the United States and Great Britain, where tens of millions of copies have been sold so far. The sales volume amounted to hundreds of thousands of copies in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
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