Strict secrecy
The two beefy men had the merchandise – a purloined copy of the intensely anticipated new Harry Potter book – hidden in a one-bedroom apartment in Kettering, a small town about 80 miles north of London.
It was there, on June 3, that they told John Askill, a reporter with the British tabloid The Sun, they wanted $91,000 for the book. And it was there that Askill tried to grab it and escape without paying.
He froze when one of the men pulled a pistol.
“I looked down the barrel of a gun – and thought I was about to die for the sake of Harry Potter,” he later wrote.
The gunman fired a shot over Askill’s shoulder, and the reporter scurried out to his car.
Without the book.
The melodrama in Kettering, with its adventure-story touches, was over a book – just a book. One that, at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, will be available in the tens of millions across the globe for $30 or less.
Yet the pent-up desire of legions of fans who gobbled up the first five installments of the series by J.K. Rowling has made any copy of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” as coveted as a magic potion, as valuable as a sorcerer’s stone.
The wall of secrecy that the Harry Potter publishers – Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Scholastic in the United States – have erected around the book has made the volume even more tantalizingly attractive.
Not only won’t Bloomsbury and Scholastic talk about what’s in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” but they won’t talk about the extraordinarily stringent security measures they’re using to keep the book under wraps.
Ask Barbara Marcus – president of children’s book publishing at Scholastic and one of fewer than a dozen people who have read the new Harry Potter – if the job of printing the 10.8 million copies for the U.S. is finished, and she’ll say: No comment.
Ask her how many stores will be getting the books: No comment. When the books will be delivered? No comment.
“We live in a culture in which people want what they can’t have,” says Paul Bogaards, publicity director of the Knopf publishing house.
It’s not only the Harry Potter books that benefit. Publishers have discovered that, often, the best way to promote a book is to keep it secret – until a predetermined moment when the work is unveiled to the world with great pomp and circumstance.
That’s what Callaway Arts & Entertainment did two years ago when it came out with Madonna’s first children’s book, “The English Roses.”
It’s what Rodale did last year in publishing Pete Rose’s gambling confession and mea culpa, “My Prison Without Bars.” And what Sentinel tried to do earlier this month with “The Truth About Hillary” by Edward Klein, the former editor of The New York Times Magazine.
The process is called an embargo, and it’s a reversal of the way book publicity usually works. Normally, a publisher does everything possible to grab the eye of a news editor or reporter, including providing advance versions of a book, known as galleys, several months before the publication date.
But, when a book is embargoed, the publisher throws a cloak of invisibility over it. No one in the news media is supposed to get a look at it or learn details of what’s in it until the laydown date – the day it goes on sale in stores.
To get a shipment of the book, store owners frequently have to sign an affidavit promising they won’t start selling it until that prescribed date.
“You want all the people rushing to the store at the same time,” explains Cindy Ratzlaff, vice president of brand marketing at Rodale.
An embargo is almost always an angst-ridden endeavor involving complex and expensive logistical challenges and many sleep-disturbed nights.
“You do it when it’s necessary, and you don’t do it if you can help it,” says Ratzlaff.
But in the modern world’s Internet-linked media competition, embargoes are virtually the only way for some books – particularly those by or about political figures, or those containing newsworthy revelations – to arrive at the bookstores without being critically or politically eviscerated or simply talked to death weeks ahead of time.
In mid-June, the Drudge Report Web site and the New York Post broke Sentinel’s embargo on Klein’s biography of Hillary Clinton, subtitled: “What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President.”
The leaks – which involved cryptic references to Hillary’s friendship with a lesbian in college and to an alleged 1979 comment by Bill Clinton that he was going to “rape” his wife – didn’t exactly prompt a media firestorm over the book. But they generated a moderate buzz prior to its June 21 release date.
“In some cases, the speculation and pre-publication rumors help,” says Will Weisser, the book’s publicist. “In other cases, they don’t.”
Knopf’s Bogaards says there was so much competition among news organizations to obtain an early copy of the Clinton book that, he was told, The New York Times offered “a bounty” to any staff member who could nab one.
Interest also was intense a year ago when the 9/11 Commission was completing its report on the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
On the same July morning the commission was holding its news conference to release the document, UPS trucks were pulling up to bookstores throughout the nation to deliver more than 500,000 paperback copies of the report. The embargo was so complete that not even the editors at Norton, the paperback’s publisher, had seen it prior to before that day.
“The commission felt it was appropriate and proper to release the report to all the citizens of the United States at the same time,” says Louise Brockett, Norton’s publicity director.
The same sort of thinking is at the heart of Rowling’s desire that all fans get access to new Harry Potter books at the same time.
“She wants all the children to be able to open that Page One and not have any preconceived filter from reviewers or anyone else,” says Scholastic’s Marcus.
Linda Bubon, co-owner of the Women and Children First bookstore in Chicago, says, in signing the required affidavit from Scholastic for a Harry Potter order, booksellers promise not to put the book on sale before the set time – and not even to open the boxes until then.
The threat, of course, is that any store that violates the embargo won’t get Harry Potter books in the future. But Bubon says there’s no need for intimidation.
“We all feel honor-bound,” she says.