Speaking of Harry Potter Pre-Orders

Publishers Weekly reported that “despite receiving 1.5 million advance orders for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Amazon only broke even on the title, the result of deep discounting and shpping incentives.” Many people have wondered why booksellers were discounting the Harry Potter novel at all since clearly readers would pay full price, heck, probably even increased prices for the novel. It’s all about market share. The hope for booksellers was to get people in the store for Harry Potter and sell them other stuff to help offset the deep discounts on the Boy Wizard. However, PW pointed out that “the preorders for Half-Blood appeared to do little to spur sales of other products in the second quarter” for Amazon with executives indicating that additional sales were less than $10 million.

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