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Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:
Background Information
Release Date: July 16, 2005
Page Count: 652 (U.S. edition), 608 (U.K. edition)
Initial Print Run: 10.8 million copies (U.S.)
Just over a year after its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was released, JK Rowling announced the title of the sixth Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (also referred to as HBP). The announcement was made on June 29, 2004 on the author's official website, www.jkrowling.com.
Rumored titles of the book hit the Internet many months prior to June 2004, which was also the month in which the third Harry Potter movie was released in theatres. These included "Harry Potter and the Mudblood Revolt," "Harry Potter and the Fortress of Shadows," "Harry Potter and the Green Flame Torch," and "Harry Potter and the Pillar of Storgé." The "Pillar of Storgé" rumor began several days before the actual announcement was made and duped a majority of fans, most of whom now refuse to admit it.
The release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, July 16, 2005, was announced by Bloomsbury on December 21, 2004, the day after JK Rowling made the following update to her official website:
"'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' is COMPLETED and has been delivered to my English language publishers, who hope to announce the publication date within 24 hours.
"Although I have joked about HP&THBP racing my third baby into the world, I have in fact had all the time I needed to tinker with the manuscript to my satisfaction and I am as happy as I have ever been with the end result. I only hope you feel that it was worth the wait when you finally read it!"
Mere hours after Barnes and Noble began taking pre-orders for the book, it shot to the top of their bestseller list. Also, on the day that the release date was announced, Bloomsbury's and Scholastic's stocks (the UK and US publishers of Harry Potter) rose 8.2% and 4.5%, respectively.
The American edition was first reported to be 672 pages long on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com on January 23, 2005, and was confirmed a day later by Scholastic. Several weeks later, on February 11, 2005, it was announced that the British edition would be 608 pages in length. (As you all know, the American edition is actually only 652 pages long. To this day, we've yet to find out whether the January 2005 confirmation of 672 pages was merely a mistake or if an additional twenty pages were cut from the book before publication, though we presume the former is the case.)
The cover art for both the American and British editions, which can be viewed here, was first revealed by Katie Couric on the "Today" show on the morning of Tuesday, March 8, 2005. Mary GrandPre, the illustrator for the American editions of the first five Harry Potter books, also drew the cover art and the inside illustrations that precede each chapter in Half-Blood Prince. British Order of the Phoenix illustrator Jason Cockcroft drew the British Half-Blood Prince cover art, which was released in conjunction with the US cover art.
Scholastic announced on March 30, 2005 that the initial print run of the book would be 10.8 million copies, making it the largest initial print run in history, topping the record set by Order of the Phoenix in 2003 by a whopping four million copies. We can, of course, expect more of the same when the yet-to-be-titled seventh book is released in 2007 or 2008.
The cover of the deluxe edition of Half-Blood Prince was released on May 11, 2005. For the first time, the deluxe edition had its own unique cover, which was also drawn by the wonderful Mary GrandPre. The deluxe edition does not contain any additional or deleted portions of the book, but does include a 32-page insert featuring near scale reproductions of Mary GrandPre's interior art, as well as a never-before-seen full-color frontispiece art on special paper, depicting a scene from the second chapter of the book. The custom-designed slipcase is foil-stamped and inside is a full cloth case book, blind-stamped on front and back cover, foil stamped on spine. The book includes full-color endpapers with jacket art from the trade edition and a wraparound jacket featuring exclusive, suitable-for-framing art from Mary GrandPre (Amazon.com).
Like the regular edition, the deluxe edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released on July 16, 2005. It is 704 pages long and had an original retail value of $60.00; the initial print run consisted of 100,000 copies.
Literary analysts conceded that they were surprised at the high demand for the adult edition of the book. More than 250,000 copies of the adult edition of Half-Blood Prince were sold on July 16, 2005. Debbie Williams of Waterstone's (a large bookstore chain in the U.K.) said, "We are amazed by the pre-reservation demand for the adult edition of 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' at launch. We are likely to see the adult edition of 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' account for more than 15 percent of launch sales for this book, which means that more adults will be reading a children's book this summer."
Another much-publicized aspect of the book launch was the immense security surrounding it. At printing plants, all workers' bags and lunchboxes were searched, as were lockers, desks, and other work areas. Video cameras and guards were positioned in a number of locations around the plants to ensure that no copy of the book wandered away unnoticed. Also, tape recorders and camera phones were banned. (Video phones weren't around yet, believe it or not...oh, how times change in a year.)
A worker at a plant in Germany said, "We heard that the British publishing house that gave our company the contract wrote a clause saying that we would be liable for something like $4.9 million if a single word of the new book leaked out before publication day."
Still, despite the heavily tightened security, two copies of the adult edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince leaked a month and a half before its release. The book thieves (Aaron Lambert, 19, and Christopher Brown, 37) tried to score a deal for $100,000 with two British tabloid newspapers, but the arrangement turned sour when one of the reporters tried to run off with the book without paying - to give it to the police, he said - which prompted one of the thieves to fire a fake gun at the reporter. Police confiscated the copies of the book and arrested the thieves. Meanwhile, the tabloid newspapers ran front-page stories about how their reporters were almost killed by Harry Potter thieves (and of course, they conveniently left out the fact that the gun was fake in a vain effort to spice up their already overly-dramatic stories).
Although annoying, the Half-Blood Prince book thieves provided Scholastic and Bloomsbury with quite a bit of free advertising in international media outlets. Scholastic chose to only spend a meager $1 million promoting the book's release, because they were confident that it would promote itself, and promote itself it did. Whether through stories of scandal or possible leaks or features on cub reporters, print and online media devoted a huge amount of their daily news coverage to the book's launch in the weeks leading up to its release. By the summer of 2005, the sheer scale of the Harry Potter phenomenon made the new book's release headline news, and advertising was rendered virtually unnecessary.
July 16 was ushered in with much pomp and circumstance. Jo Rowling hosted the most grandiose launch party in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she waved at a throng of tens of thousands on her way to Edinburgh Castle. Inside the castle, she read part of chapter six, "Draco's Detour," to an eager crowd of seventy "cub reporters," each of whom was hand-picked by various media outlets throughout Europe, and also to audiences overseas through a live video feed. The next day, after the cub reporters had been given roughly 34 hours to read the book, a press conference was held at the castle and each of the reporters was allowed to pose one question to Jo.
10 million copies of Half-Blood Prince were sold worldwide on the first day of its release, mostly in America (6.9 million) and the United Kingdom (2 million). This figure does not include the millions of copies pre-ordered online in the six months leading up to July. Scholastic began printing an additional 2.7 million copies of the book two days later in an attempt to cope with the unprecedented demand for the book.
The novel garnered rave reviews from critics across the globe, a feat not achieved by Rowling since Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999 (the fourth and fifth books both received mixed reviews from literary critics). Although a nice affirmation of her writing skills, it mattered little what kind of reviews the book received, as the incredible amount of hype surrounding it deemed it almost completely review-proof. Within its first weekend, Half-Blood Prince joined the ranks of the best-reviewed books of 2005 and topped several critics' lists at the year's end. Comments included "well crafted," "one of the best," a "real triumph," and the "darkest and most unsettling yet." The AP's Deepti Hajela called it a "powerful, unforgettable setup for the finale," and The Macon Telegraph extolled the tome, calling Rowling an "expert seamstress." The New York Times wrote that the book was "the darkest and most unsettling installment yet," and The Sydney Morning Herald said that it was "incredibly detailed, knitting fantasy with reality in an entirely believable fashion."
In December 2005, five months after the launch of Half-Blood Prince, Bloomsbury announced that both the childrens' and adult editions of the book would be released in paperback format on June 23, 2006. American and Canadian fans won't be able to get their hands on a paperback copy of it until July 25, 2006, however. Two million copies of the American paperback will be printed initially at an individual retail price of $10.
Back to Book 6
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