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The first company to be transformed was Bloomsbury, a London publishing house. It was a somewhat unlikely home for a blockbuster children’s book series. In 1996 the firm’s children’s books division had generated just £732,000 ($1.2m) in sales, compared with £4.7m for the reference division. Nigel Newton signed up the manuscript that was to become “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” after market-testing it on his daughter.
The firm had little idea of what was to come. Bloomsbury’s annual report for 1996, written shortly before the publication of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, contained no mention of the forthcoming book. The following year’s report celebrated three big titles. They were “Great Apes” by Will Self, “The Magician’s Wife” by Brian Moore and “Fugitive Pieces” by Anne Michaels. The report did mention that a book by Ms Rowling had won the Smarties prize, awarded by children, and was selling well. Even in the spring of 1999, by which point the Harry Potter books had sold 763,000 copies, the company was still emphasising other children’s books, referring to the Harry Potter series as “the tip of a publishing iceberg”.
In fact the Harry Potter books were the iceberg. As each book appeared it drew new readers to the series and expanded sales of earlier books in a snowball effect. Thanks largely to the boy wizard, Bloomsbury’s turnover, which had gradually increased from £11m in 1995 to £14m in 1997, took off. In 1999 it stood at £21m. Two years later it was £61m. By the middle of this decade, with Bloomsbury’s revenues above £100m, rival publishers were griping that there was no point bidding against the firm for a children’s title. So far the books, which are published in America by Scholastic, have sold more than 400m copies worldwide. Not all were read by the young. Central to the books’ success was a repackaging, with a darker cover, for adults embarrassed about being seen reading a children’s book.