On 24 August this year, Friend of This Blog Lesley Stevens wrote me from the UK with this prediction about Lethal White:

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!”

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…]