Cursed Child of series already a US best-seller
Harry Potter is casting a spell, again, over the publishing industry.
Nine years after the publication of the seventh and last book in the best-selling boy wizard series, preorders for the script of a new, soldout London play is the most preordered book since 2007 in the United States, retail book sellers Barnes & Noble said on Monday.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is billed as the eighth story in the series and is to be published at midnight on Sunday. A script rather than a narrative novel, it is being published a day after the official opening of the London stage production of the same name.
The play, based on an idea by British author and Potter creator J.K. Rowling, is set 19 years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It features a grown-up Potter as an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic and father of three children, grappling with his past.
Barnes and Noble says in a statement that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been the US company’s most pre-ordered book since 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the final book in the original series.
It does not give sales figures but says the book is expected to be its biggest seller of the year, and that midnight parties are planned in stores around the nation on Saturday.
Amazon Books says Cursed Child is already its top US pre-order in print and on Kindle e-book of 2016.
Rowling agreed to publish the script to meet public demand after appeals from fans who couldn’t get to London to see the play, publishers said earlier this year.
The play is already sold out through May 2017. It opens ahead of the November movie version of Rowling’s Potter spinoff book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and follows the opening in April of a second Potter attraction within a theme park, this time at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
More than 450 million copies of the seven original Potter books have been sold worldwide in 79 languages.