Lethal White: Marketing Effort and Sales

September 29, 2018 by 3 Comments

Here are two facts and some uninformed speculation late at night about the marketing effort being made for the promotion of Lethal White and its sales thus far.

The facts:

(1) The Marketing of Lethal White has been Low Key, at best, and so thin that “negligent” might be a good word for it. Rowling did one ‘interview’ with The New York Times as Robert Galbraith (she answered approved questions in writing rather than live and in person). She changed the banner on her Twitter page to a Lethal White header and listed herself as “Author sometimes known as Robert Galbraith.” And…

Well, that was about it. Her tweeting to her follower-audience of 14.4 million the week before and of the book’s publication focused on Brexit, volun-tourism, and — who knew? — Crimes of Grindelwald. Her publishers bought the requisite advertising in book review sections of the legacy print media — and Rowling moved on. Last week she did a Lumos event on Broadway with the Cursed Child crew and began the promotions for the next Fantastic Beasts film by sitting for an interview on the Today show.

She mentioned two times during these appearances that she was writing crime novels but never said the name of the book published six days before.

(2) Sales have been good, not great. On the ‘Rowling Sales Scale,’ of course, they have been less than pathetic, but it is not fair to judge any author other than Dan Brown or James Patterson with that unit of measure. I don’t have any numbers other than Amazon sales, lists in the moment and the best sellers of the week, and those results are not eye-poppers. Lethal White was at #13 a week ago and #2 today on the ‘Best Sellers of the Week’ lists and that is quite good (if being shut out of #1 by The Wonky Donkey must be a little humiliating).

What’s to complain about being #2 at the World’s Biggest Bookstore and at USA Today, which uses the Amazon list as part of its calculation? I’m afraid that this list, the week‘s compilation, inflates Lethal White’s success because it was the week of release and may include all the pre-ordered books shipping. If you look at the hourly count at Amazon today, Strike4 is #39. I have to suspect that the drop next week will be at least as great as the climb this week from #13 to #2. (Anyone more familiar than I with the Amazon algorhythms for calculating best sellers, please check in.) Rowling did not make either the combined eBook and print or the ‘Hardcover Fiction Best Seller’ list in tomorrow’s New York Times.

(3) The Uninformed Speculation from Effect Back to Cause? Rowling is not only happy that her Strike books are not being marketed with the push that would make them #1 best sellers on Amazon and in the print newspapers — interviews in a variety of magazines, broadcast media, and papers, outreach to the Harry Potter fandom through fan sites and conferences, and advertising buys and pushes at booksellers conventions, trade journals, and mass media — she insists that these efforts not be made. Rowling continues to act as if her experiment with the Robert Galbraith pseudonym is a live venture and she will only know if the novels are any good, that is, become best sellers on their own relatively speaking, which is to say, without invoking the magical name of ‘J. K. Rowling, author of the beloved Harry Potter novels’ on the cover of the books or in active promotion.

Which is nigh on unbelievable, frankly. That would suggest she is a prisoner of heroic insecurities and in need of oversized confirmation in a test that cannot be taken seriously because everyone knows ‘Galbraith’ is Rowling.

What else could it be? Again, look at the problem backwards. What have we learned since Lethal White was published just here on this web site? There is the possibility that Rowling does not want Harry Potter fandom’s legion of fine-tooth-comb serious readers going through the Strike books because of what they would discover. Beside the gaffes like “Basra, Afghanistan,” and “Ciarra Parker” that editors missed in reading Lethal White. She’d rather that no one (or relatively few readers) realize the books are an experiment in intertextual allusion and commentary on Rowling’s own Hogwarts Saga in structure and plot points. Not to mention the mythological underpinnings and probable direction of future books.

Let me know in the comment boxes below what you think of the marketing efforts, the sales figures for Lethal White, and why there seems to be so little effort to promote the novels of the world’s best selling author. It’s a mystery as least as difficult to figure out as the stories Rowling-Galbraith is giving us and a public domain puzzle we should be able to solve, I think, with the available clues. “The game is afoot!”

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Alohomora: Ring Composition, Part One

September 28, 2018 by 2 Comments

I have been podcasting at MuggleNet.com since 2011, first with Keith Hawk on a show called ‘MuggleNet Academia’ and now with Katy McDaniel on ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling.’ I do it because it is a lot of fun — the conversations with guests and the show host are almost always challenging and a delight — and because a lot more people listen to those podcasts than will ever read what I write here at HogwartsProfessor. MuggleNet is truly a global platform and it is a privilege to get to speak from it about Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, and literature in general in this age which has largely been shaped imaginatively by the work of J. K. Rowling.

There are, of course, other podcasts on MuggleNet and much more popular and less ‘heady’ ones than those in which I participate. One of the most successful is ‘Alohomora.’ The team of podcasters there have recorded more than 250 episodes devoted to a chapter-by-chapter re-reading of the Hogwarts Saga; their following is sufficiently broad that they have advertisers, a paid producer, and a real presence at the website and Fandom.

Though I know all the principals on the show and have for some time, I had never been invited to join the crew for a talk about a specific chapter or topic. Until this month! Kat Miller and Company wanted to do a show on Ring Composition and I was the default subject matter expert. You can read about and listen to the show here: Ring Composition, Part One: It’s a WOW Thing

To anticipate your question, no, I don’t know if there will be a ‘Part Two’ to follow-up on this ‘Part One.’ That they do not mention anywhere in their write-up of the podcast that I was a guest speaker suggests that, if they do, I won’t be invited to participate!

Part One was a fun and firehose conversation, though, as none of the others knew the first thing about chiasmus or ring writing and its importance to Potter studies. Your boy Gilderoy obliged them with an hour long review and introduction to the subject.

Which maybe put them off? Maybe! The good news is that, if you haven’t got the time to read Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle, and want to learn a little more about story structure and Harry’s magic, this podcast will serve as an appetizer for the subject. Let me know what you think, even if you’ve read the book, of the podcast in the comment boxes below.

Is it possible I’ll ever be invited to ‘Speak Beasties,’ the MuggleNet Fantastic Beasts podcast franchise? 

 

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, MuggleNet Academia, Reading Writing Rowling Podcast, Ring Composition

Crimes of Grindelwald Final Trailer

September 26, 2018 by 2 Comments

My inbox is full of owls about the “final trailer” for Crimes of Grindelwald and its stunning revelations. Color me “non plussed.”

Were any of our regular readers surprised that the Maledictus was named Nagini? I hope not. I discussed it in November last year here and here, and Oxford’s Beatrice Groves explained it’s literary allusion here that December. Yesterday’s “big reveal” was rather stale news, I thought, for those paying attention.

Was anyone as disappointed as I was in the ‘Today’ show interview with The Presence and the Crimes of Grindelwald second-tier actors as I was? After 20-plus years of interviews, we spend more than ten minutes of a twenty minute interview on her the Cinderella story of Rowling’s single motherhood and how often she thinks of her mother? “Where do you get your ideas?” “What’s with the return to red hair?”

Rowling managed to sneak in a reference to her ‘Robert Galbraith’ novels, which I suspect none of the five people being filmed there not JKR have read, but only as something like a hobby she does when she’s not doing important collaborative Wizarding World work with David Yates, et aliis.

If there is a keeper moment (besides Rowling’s reference to her blonde bombshell look of a decade as “accidental” [!] and “looking like Dolly Parton’s plainer sister”), it was when the interviewer asks why Rowling doesn’t do many interviews. Rowling pauses significantly before offering her rehearsed answer about writers and their energies.

She seemed to choke back the answer, “Have you read any of my books and thought about what I think of the legacy media? People like you?” Or, “Because when I do speak to people like you, I get questions about my life as a single mother, the color of my hair, where I get my ideas, and how often I think of my late mother rather than the artistry and meaning of my novels and screen writing or anything of interest to serious readers…”

Anyway, lemmeno what you think of the trailer and its “revelations.” For a scene by scene breakdown of the trailer without any discussion of the trailer structure or possible meaning for the films, look here. More trailer breakdown, too, on  PotterMore.com, something like the horse’s mouth (Mouth of Sauron?). Tomorrow we’ll go back to unpacking the depths of Lethal White, a novel Rowling wrote herself, with a post by Louise Freeman about a song that belonged on Rowling’s White Horse Playlist. And about Matthew’s desire for revenge on Cormoran…

Forgotten as it seems to be in the media and Potter fandom, Lethal White was published only a week ago. We have plenty of time to look at the latest Warner Brothers teaser droppings about Cimes of Grindelwald, which advertising, despite the supposed “finality” of this trailer, will no doubt continue right through November. We have only just begun to talk about the depths of Lethal White!

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts

Lethal White: A Review of the Reviews

September 24, 2018 by 6 Comments

We’ve been working hard here at HogwartsProfessor.com in the weeks before and the one week following publication of Lethal White to provide the best in speculation and commentary on the latest book by J. K. Rowling (‘Robert Galbraith’). How about a break today to look at what the professional book reviewers had to say? I found seven reviews of Lethal White in major newspapers and online journals to make a decent survey of critical reaction.

It’s a pretty disappointing picture, I’m afraid to say, if most recommended the book to readers. We’re looking pretty good here in comparison, as you might expect, with respect to depth and length and seriousness.

On the one hand, you have to sympathize with writers who have to put up a 500 word review of a very long book under deadline. I read Lethal White in a day and it has taken me a week in conversation with friends here to begin to come to terms with the novel’s artistry and meaning.

On the other hand, it’s a little frustrating that none of the seven book reviews I have read online have more to say than “I like it” or “It needs editing down” in conclusion after a review of plot points sans spoilers and the occasional PC critique. Not one, for example,  mentions, not to say “discusses,” the beat-you-over-the-head white horse imagery of Lethal White. It’s not as if Rowling has been especially subtle in cueing us on Twitter and in the text to the importance of that symbol. That omission just leaves a serious reader scratching his or her head.

Not too surprising and pretty funny actually, is that none of the journalists note even in an aside that the media in Galbraith’s novels continue to be a set of mercenary, soulless jackals that everyone hates and uses to their own ends (while being very careful not to be taken unawares by the pack).

If you want to survey with me the seven reviews I found, published as early as a week before the publication date and as late as the day after (I think we can asume that all received advance copies several weeks before we got ours), I have gathered links and excerpts after a paragraph review of each review after the jump. Enjoy! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

M. Evan Willis: The Mythic Context and Hermetic Meaning of Cormoran Strike

September 23, 2018 by 3 Comments

We’ve been discussing the Greek myth underlying the Cormoran Strike mysteries, namely, Leda and the Swan, since Joanne Gray and I wrote up the many links between the Strike story-line and the mythology of Castor and Pollux (and the White Horses!). M. Evan Willis, who has been reading Cormoran Strike in mythic and hermetic terms as he did Harry Potter, writes today about the revelations of Lethal White and why he thinks they re-set the mythic setting of the stories and make the events of the coming novels predictable; he says to look for a Matthew-Charlotte alliance a la the Leucippides to thwart Robin and Cormoran, the Castor-Pollux stand-ins, the pair who stole their prospective spouses.

Stand by to have your minds blown as he lays out Rowling’s re-telling of the age-old myth and what we can expect in not only novels four to seven but also why there will necessarily be more than seven Strike mysteries! Enjoy!

With Lethal White just published, I have a handful of thoughts concerning the use of myth in the series as revealed by the new book. Familiarity with my earlier guest-post on Hermes will be assumed as background information.

I’ll start with two points on method:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Guest Posts