Harry Potter and the Blockbuster Model

This will be my last Harry Potter post for a while, I promise. Harry Potter season is almost over, and this could well be the last serious Harry Potter season there is -- the movies, alone, don't create the same buzz as the novels (which now that I think about it is a pretty interesting fact in itself) because the books never cover new ground.

But this is what I've learned from Harry Potter in terms of the fantasy publishing industry: the industry has moved towards the blockbuster model of producing novels and marketing them. As I said in yesterday's post, the idea that Harry Potter leapt onto the scene with no advertising, that it was in some fashion a "sleeper", isn't particularly true. Scholastic gave Philosopher's Stone a huge (for the industry) advertising budget and every book since then has seen sharp increases in advertising budgets (not to mention the various cross-promotions, such as movies, toys, etc., each of which has its own advertising that nevertheless boosts sales of the books, just as the book's ads increase sales of the cross-promotional items).

I think that they're understanding the implications of the fact that, even more than just about anything else, readers are intensely loyal to particular writers. They've long known that readers read writers they've read -- if you've bought Author X before, you're far more liable to get another book by Author X even if you didn't particularly like Author X's stuff than pick up a book by Author Y whom you've never read. So, advertising-wise, it makes a lot of sense to have elaborate advertising budgets designed to create "brand loyalty".

So, lately, there have been a fair number of designer fantasy series, not just Harry Potter (and, indeed, compared to some of these, Harry Potter, in terms of literature, is downright stellar in quality). So, Terry Goodkind's The Wizard's First Rule sold at an auction for $275,000 and he got a $300,000 advertising budget. He'd never been published before. All of his books have been bestsellers. George R. R. Martin's books also had a huge advertising budget, and have also all been bestsellers, each and every one. The same is true of Jordan's Wheel of Time books, where a relatively unknown author was given a huge advance and ad budget and has gone on to great commercial success. This is a marked difference from reading fantasy in my own youth, where the books were never bestsellers and never had anything like advertising budgets.

Or, to say it another way, Harry Potter novels are promoted like a movie, to create fan loyalty in the characters and situations, and creating star writers like the movie industry has star actors and directors. A lot of people "trust" Rowling the same way many movie audiences trust, say, James Cameron. And, furthermore, the fantasy industry is following this model. (I think it's happening to fantasy first in genre fiction because of the intense cross-promotional potential in most fantasy series. It'd be pretty damn hard to make a video game out of an Ellroy novel, but it's really easy to make a video game out of virtually any fantasy series because of the emphasis on magic and monsters -- that sort of thing looks really good in video games! Likewise, you can do cross-promotion in big, special effects laden blockbuster movies, brightly colored comics, etc., etc. as opposed to novels where much of the drama occurs in the private thoughts and subtle actions of the characters.)

I don't think this is a terribly good idea, for the same reason I dislike the blockbuster system in Hollywood. It really cuts out a lot of talent in order to score the big hit, because it centralizes all the money in a small number of products, which will have the effect of choking off a lot of other writers who might have otherwise made it enough to keep writing (tho' there are other things happening that counterindicate this, such as the rapid growth of fanfic communities, but since most of those are part of the hype machine . . .) and definitely centralizes marketing and distribution in a way is designed to keep out competition. I don't like it much at all.

But . . . as a writer who's trying to get a novel published, what does a person do? I understand this. Is it better or worse to talk frankly about that understanding? Should I say to prospective agents and publishers, "Look, I think that this would do well in the blockbuster system of novels. It has great cross-promotional potential, video games, comic books, the whole works"? Because, from all the "how-to get published" books I've read, and various discussions, the subject of money is virtually taboo at the initial phases of the negotiation -- but, on the other hand, I really think I understand how this works. My feeling about the industry is that, while they do admit that publishing businesses operate on a profit basis, they also say that talking about money off the bat is a faux pas. So, would it be an even bigger faux pas to talk about one of the other elephants in the room? The actual underlying motivation of the industry? Would it be taken as a sign of cleverness and willingness to "do what it takes to get published" by talking about it so frankly? Or would it seem arrogant and insulting? I honestly don't know.

But, Harry Potter showed me that fantasy novels, especially, but to some extent all publishing models, are increasingly blockbuster modeled, where writers are packaged as brands to create loyalty through extensive advertising in a way similar to big movies and video games.

Harry Potter and Advertising, Plus the Fate of the Free World, Still

Preface: I almost didn't post this. But only one person actually bothered to post about the actual point I made yesterday but a fair number of people, both privately and on my blog or LJ, just defended the books. Which missed the point of my post, but also confirmed my point.

I've got some additional comments about Harry Potter and hype. One of the more common arguments against this applying to Harry Potter is the "stealth success" of Sorcerer's Stone -- how it became a best-seller without any advertising or promotions. This is, simply speaking, untrue. While the UK publisher, Bloombury, didn't have much faith in Sorcerer's Stone (or, more accurately, Philosopher's Stone), and advanced Rowling a mere $4000. However -- and this happened before the UK publication of the book -- Scholastic gave Rowling an advance of $100,000 and about the same as the advertising budget. People familiar with the publishing industry will realize that this is an extremely large sum of money, advanced with the expectation of high sales. Obviously, the book performed, but this is normal when you've got a good advertising budget.

Because -- and I'm surprised that I need to say this -- advertising works. About 1 in 6 dollars in the US is spent on advertising. But even in response to yesterday's post about Harry Potter, what I found is that . . . no one wanted to talk about the hype. Some people were interested in correcting what they saw to be factual errors, and damn near everyone tried to defend the quality of the books, but no one seemed to consider the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, their enjoyment of media was manufactured.

Ironically, the biggest proponent -- at least in public -- of the idea that advertising doesn't work is . . . the advertising industry! Seriously, go and follow any of the arguments that the ad business advances whenever someone wants to regulate advertising. Suddenly, advertising doesn't work. Well, OK, then, if advertising doesn't work, why is 1 in 6 dollars in America being spent on it? Because, to say the obvious, it does work. To say what few people want to believe: it works on you.

You. The person reading this. It works on you. If you're connected enough to the system to be reading my blog, you're connected enough to be effected by advertising. And most of us don't have any idea how sly these bastards are.

For instance, a lot of sneaker sales depend on what people in poor urban areas are wearing -- the guys playing hoop down at the park. So shoe companies have for years paid street ball players to wear their shoes as a mechanism of sales. As advertisement that no one even knows is actually happening. Or how advertisers write up "news stories" and submit them as genuine articles and then news shows show these ads as actual news. Or lean on magazines and TV shows to write favorable articles about the products being advertised.

But even more than that. Look around your house, really look around at the things you actually buy. How often do you buy something because of the label? Recently, a person I knew bought an Ipod Shuffle. It's this 2 GB MP3 player that you can't program. It's always on random shuffle. He paid about a hundred dollars for it. For about 20% less, I bought an MP3 player that has more memory and upon which I can make my own playlists. Why would anyone want to buy an Ipod Shuffle when there are better products for less money? And this is generally true of all Ipods and gear for Ipods. It's pretty easy to find better things for less money if a person bothers to look. But, well, Apple is making a fortune betting that people will not look, that they'll buy the hype, see the adds and won't even consider the possibility of there being different products. They go into a store and buy an Ipod rather than go into the next aisle over and buy an entirely superior MP3 player for less money.

The obviousness of this leaps out at me. Advertising works. But it seems to me that most people pretend it doesn't work on them. And it's partially true. I've never succumbed to the hype and bought a single Brittany Spears album. No matter how cool their commercials are, I don't buy Budweiser. But I look forwards to Grand Theft Auto 4 . . . despite strongly disliking the last big GTA 3 game. And I've seen a number of absolutely terrible science-fiction, fantasy and comic book movies because of the hype. So, while it's true that not all advertising works on everyone, it works on everyone some of the time. It works well enough that at almost no restaurant can a person get anything other than Coke or Pepsi products. Would someone really not order soda if it was RC Cola? How often does that happen? "I'd like a cola." "We have RC." "OH, NO! You don't have Coke or Pepsi! I REFUSE to get a soda!" I estimate roughly zero percent of the time. But, nevertheless, it's almost impossible to get RC as a fountain drink. So, even if the advertising didn't work on you, it's worked on virtually every person who orders drinks for convenience stores and restaurants. Which is another one of those hidden ways that advertising works.

But Harry Potter fans, even when confronted with the reality that Harry Potter books are the most hyped books in the world will consistently attribute the success of the books to the quality. Which is, of course, the same argument that people use about Coke or Pepsi. "They taste better." But why do they taste better? Do they taste better because in a world without labeling or advertisements we'd all choose to drink nothing but those two drinks, or due to the pervasiveness of advertising we define good tasting soda by either Coke or Pepsi? It's the same argument that people use about Brittany Spears -- that it's the best possible pop music, that the music system does, in fact, channel people to the top based on quality (even though the corruptions of no industry are as obvious as the music industry). The media attention defines what is acceptable as good. It makes it's choices based on it's priorities and that's what we get, and it's all most of us get, because most of us don't know where to look for things other than the obvious places. (This is true of me, too, by the way, though perhaps less than many because of my relative media isolation. The TV at our house has neither an antenna to get local channels nor do we have cable, so I miss all TV ads, pretty much, which makes small talk weird, BTW. Until I divested myself of TV with ads I never knew how much small talk is based on TV commercials. Not even TV SHOWS but TV COMMERCIALS.)

I mean, all you Harry Potter readers . . . c'mon! You're liking the most popular fantasy series since Lord of the Rings. You're liking the most hyped fantasy series ever, the most hyped series of books in history. But everyone I speak to about this that likes the Harry Potter books, each and every one, first tries to attribute the success of the books to the quality of them. They usually do this even after at least partially agreeing that the books are, shall we say, flawed. So, they say the books are flawed, but, golly, they're so good, and none of them, even for a moment, step back and analyze why they find the the most hyped book series ever produced to be so good, don't consider for a moment that advertising works on them, too. That advertising's purpose is to create longings that it then fills, and the reason why you're satisfied is because you've bought precisely the product that they've told you fulfills the very longing they've also created in you!

Like I said in yesterday's post, this is a big deal. It's much bigger than Harry Potter or Brittany Spears or GTA 4. Because those advertising tricks I mentioned above? Business and government do them, too. Take, say, global warming. Just the other day, I had a bit of a flame war with a fella who told me that it was unproven that humans made climate change. How could someone take that position? Because primarily the power industry has done everything it can to engage in advertising to make climate change look ridiculous. It has drafted advertisement and presented it as science, it has leaned on news agencies it advertises on, it has put it's shills in legitimate scientific organizations to promote it's agenda. All those tricks people fall for -- that occasionally everyone falls for -- business and government do. So I think it's vital that responsible citizens learn to understand when they've bought into the hype and discuss things clearly, because corporations and governments aren't trying to fool us, they are fooling us. For decades, literally decades, scientists have been talking about climate change, about the precautionary principle, about the long-term social, economic and political effects of climate change would be -- and because of the hype, it took decades for most people to believe there was any problem at all. And most people still don't want to do anything about it! They don't want to stop driving their cars, or eat primarily locally produced foodstuffs, etc., etc., even the people who are absolutely sold on the principle that people are responsible for climate change do very little to do something about it. (The number of SUVs at the farmer's market makes me want to wretch.) Even measures like merely increasing the efficiency of new buildings is met with terrible opposition, because corporations promote the idea that energy efficiency is somehow bad for the economy (which goes with the hype that the economy is the most important thing that there is).

So I find it frustrating, and worrisome, that even about something as essentially frivolous as a series of fantasy novels, I can find almost no one that will acknowledge that the hype has effected them. It makes me worried and somewhat depressed because the same skills that a person would use to identify the hype of Harry Potter novels, or Brittany Spears albums, or GTA 4 games, or whatever bit of hype a particular person might fall into . . . these are the same skills that a person would use to identify when corporate and government propaganda has influenced them. In this, the biggest thing that keeps a person trapped by advertisement is the naive belief that they are immune to it. You're not. I'm not. That's why one-sixth of the US economy is advertising: because it works on you.

Harry Potter, Hype and the Fate of the Free World

Harry Potter season is upon us. Everywhere I go, everyone is talking about that damn book! I swear, I tried to understand the appeal and I think, intellectually, that I do. The appeal is the same as with, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars, where teenagers coping with the struggles of growing up have to deal with these extraordinary challenges. But upon reading the actual Harry Potter novels -- I read the first five, caught up at my in-laws who lived in rural Indiana during a snowy Christmas season one year; I have read the first five -- I found myself . . . well, disappointed wasn't the exact word. The first and third were disappointing -- tho' I still think generally good things about Azkhaban -- but the fourth and fifth, and particularly Goblet of Fire weren't disappointing in the sense that they failed to live up to the hype . . . they were disappointing in the sense that they were deeply stupid. Everything good that was said about them is, really, in the category of a lie.

The character development wasn't believable, nor particularly interesting. As I have said before, the most fantastic element about the Harry Potter novels is how an abused child suddenly thrust into wealth, popularity and fame is such a nice kid; Rowling's inability or disinterest in having Harry, or any other characters in the books, face the reality of his abuse at the hands of the Dursleys simply invalidates the books as having real character development. And Harry grows up like a "real teenager" only in universes where the predominate occupation of fourteen and fifteen year old boys isn't sex.

The writing style was plodding and huge sections of the book were entirely extraneous, such as the interminable nonsense about what classes everyone is taking and the tedious details of what happens in each and every class. But, yet, there Rowling is, driving forward like the Juggernaut walking through concrete. She gets there, but you've got to have a lot of patience.

And then there's Voldemort! Now, as a person who likes comic books, I find him to be pretty flat and one dimensional. Seriously. Supervillains out of comic books have better described motivations than Voldemort. He makes Ultron seem positively three dimensional and can't hold a candle to the motivations of a character such as Magneto. But he's presented like he isn't high camp and we're expected to take this shallow supervillain seriously.

But, really, what is brutally stupid are the plots. If someone asks me, I will take the time to go on at great lengths about the plot of Goblet of Fire in particular, because that particular book is so intensely dumb, so brutally stupid, that I can go on about it at some length. But in general, the plots go forward only because of every damn year someone seems to forget that Voldemort is trying to kill Harry Potter, and every plot resolution happens only because of a deus ex machina. Something "magical" happens and Harry is saved! Yay! Except there is a difference between magical verisimilitude and deus ex machina, and time and again Rowling just has something illogical and improbable happen to save Harry through no effort of his own, in such a way that no one could really see it coming. In Sorcerer's Stone, at the end when Voldemort just crumbles to dust rather than killing Harry is such an example. Could anyone have predicted that a mother's love could make a person disintegrate? No. Yet, there it was, there it was.

Which is really just a preface to my point, however. A rant because every time I turn around for the past couple of days people have been talking about how splendid Harry Potter is, and he's not. The books are childish, not child-like with their love of whimsy and brightly hued sense of wonder and merriment, but childish with plodding writing combined with stupid plots mixed up with juvenile character development. My point is . . .

How have these books gotten to be the fastest selling novels of all time? They're not that good. Now, a fair number of people are going to say that they are good and my above statements and brief analysis of them is merely wrong.

Or, more generally, what is the mechanism through which any banal piece of media receives undeserved praise? Even if you don't agree with me that the Harry Potter novels are mediocrity that has achieved undeserved attention, I'm sure that if we try we can all think of media things that do (90210 or Brittany Spears albums, anyone?).

The short answer is . . . hype, in the sense of advertisement and media manipulation. Never in my lifetime has a novel been so intensely hyped as the Harry Potter novels. After each novel's release there's this media driven speculation -- often found in the straight news, so let us not doubt that it is media driven -- about what's going to happen in the next novel. Along the way, Rowling is sure to give carefully managed interviews (and always by extremely sympathetic interviewers) where she lets out hints that are then propagated through the traditional media to an audience of literally millions. Then there's the inevitable discussion of piracy and spoilers as a ramp up to the release of the book, and the deluge of traditional advertisement before it's actual release.

Part of what this does is also create, and this is a new development, an online community centered around the novels. You can see shadows of this with stuff like Martin's Fire and Ice books or Jordan's Wheel of Time novels, but Harry Potter kicks their asses hard. So, unlike virtually any other novel that a person reads, people will read a Harry Potter novel and then leap online to talk about it. And there will be talk, unlike, say, if after reading a good Captain Alatriste novel I jumped online to talk about one of them no one would say anything. (Indeed, that's the proximate cause of me writing this post. I can't turn around with someone mentioning that damn book! People, c'mon, if you're going to write about a book, write about a book that isn't the biggest event novel in history! Write about something that I might not otherwise hear about! Will no one rid me of this meddlesome wizard . . . oh, it was a bad idea to compare Voldemort to Henry II, who was played by Peter O'Toole in both Becket and A Lion in Winter. Sorta emphasizes the shallowness of Voldemort.) But because of the media exposure, it is particularly fruitful to talk about Harry Potter novels -- other people will listen far more intently than if you talk about any other novel. Which, of course, serves the hype very well. Not only are there conventional media sources bombarding us with Harry Potter, the formal and informal online communities will generate their own buzz, as well as being ideal for market research for additional advertising!

And, this is what amazes me, virtually no one sees it. Virtually no one sees that a key element to liking the Harry Potter novels is their participation in the hype. When you talk to people about it, and this is my reasonably broad experience, it will be defended first in terms of quality (the novels ARE that good, and your objections are WRONG) and then, and this is surprisingly common, that Harry Potter novels are responsible for improvements in literacy (hey, the news says so, and the news never lies, right? -- though finding a peer reviewed study that demonstrates such a thing is a little more difficult; suffice it to say here that the correlation between Harry Potter novels and improved literacy is both weak and tenuous and to buy into you've got to ignore alternate hypotheses such as the amount of time that children spend online engaging in, say, text messaging and reading webpages and writing emails). The notion that the hype is to some extent (and I think to a very large extent) responsible for their interest and appreciation of the novels is simply unthinkable.

(Admission and irony: I am clearly swept up in the Harry Potter hype. Obviously. The hype is pervasive and annoying in my circles and this is my reaction to it. My critique here is, furthermore, part of the hype. There's no such thing as bad publicity.)

And before rejecting my critique, take a second if you must to separate Harry Potter out from it. Think, instead, about the hype surrounding Hollywood blockbusters, particularly those in serial form, where bad movie after bad movie follows in blindly. Think of, say, Die Hard movies, or Star Wars movies, and how the quality of the second Die Hard movie didn't stop there from being made a third and fourth, or how the truly elaborate awfulness of episodes one and two didn't stop episode three from being made -- and then take a deep breath and realize that all the Star Wars and Die Hard movies have been financially successful. Think of all those Britanny Spears albums or New Kids on the Block or N'Sync. All I've said is just as true for Die Hard, Star Wars and N'Sync as it is Harry Potter, and it's true even if I'm wrong about the specifics of Harry Potter (tho' I'm not, hehe).

I think the importance of this goes way beyond Harry Potter, Star Wars or N'Sync. It has to do with how people relate to media. Not that we buy into the hype. If you want to buy into the hype, hey, knock yourselves out. Hype can be fun, interesting and cool. It is a way, after all, to meet a lot of people, to involve yourself in something. I sometimes like getting caught up in the hype! I find myself looking forward to the GTA 4 game, even tho' I strongly disliked San Andreas. So, my problem isn't even with the hype, per se. The problem I'm seeing is that most people are manipulated by the hype and refuse to acknowledge it.

If people can't recognize the hype that's being sold to them by Scholastic or Virgin Records, what chance do they of understanding the hype around the serious social and political issues of our time?

I feel that the ability to deal with media in America is one of the most important things we must improve. We live in a media saturated environment. We are being bombarded from all sides, almost constantly, with various narratives. Some of these narratives are much louder, more invasive and cleverly arranged than others. People will, naturally, be drawn to ideas that have been surrounded with these loud, invasive and clever narratives -- this advertising and hype -- than those that don't have equally good narratives. But, as I hope I've demonstrated, the advertising has only a tangential relationship to the actual quality of what is advertised. Sure, with books and movies if you buy into the hype of one and ignore another, you're just missing out on a book or movie you might have otherwise enjoyed much more than what was hyped. But when this is taken into the social sphere, the inability to recognize hype and ignore it to seriously examine the ideas behind the hype has dramatic effects for the country and the world. The issue isn't if Harry Potter dies or not, but if real people die or not. And I think that we all can think of situations where hype was used in preference to clear discussion of facts . . . and the consequences have been disastrous.

I will leave you with a quote from the great Chuck D: "Don't believe the hype."

Tomorrow I'll touch on this subject again, in a somewhat different way, as some meditations about the publishing industry.