By Darryl Mason
UPDATE : Since the story below was posted, JK Rowling has held a press conference and announced the following :
* She won't be writing an eighth Harry Potter novel, saying, "I do have closure with Harry. I have no plans to write another novel. I'm pretty sure I'm done on the novel front."------------------
* The 7 Harry Potter novels will be sold on PotterMore.com from October.
* PotterMore.com will create 'expanded universes' for the Harry Potter novels. Each novel in the series will get its own interactive, explorable "world" on the site, and items like wands and potions will be sold to allow fans to go deeper into these worlds. A paywall, of a kind, to extra content.
* Rowling said she has 18,000 words of extra material for the site, adding more detail to the history of the houses of Hogwarts and the personal histories of key characters.
* Rowling said the focus of PotterMore will be on "reading".
Harry Potter creator JK Rowling has detonated the literary equivalent of a nuclear bomb amongst the mega-giants of book publishing today.
She has announced it won't be one of the massive corporate book publishers who releases all 7 Harry Potter novels as e-books, or digital books. It will be her.
JK Rowling is set to become the first billionaire self-publisher.
When JK Rowling first signed her Harry Potter book publishing deal (for an advance of a few thousand dollars), she did not sign away the "electronic book rights" as they were known in the 1990s. She retained those rights.
And now those Harry Potter digital book rights, which she would have been offered perhaps the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for in the original HP publishing deal, will make JK Rowling the first author to earn more than a billion dollars from ebook sales. I'll explain why below.
Here's how JK Rowling launched PotterMore, her Harry Potter digital publishing venture today :
Selling ebooks and audio books of already published Harry Potter novels will just be the start of what JK Rowling will do with Evermore. My guess is it will be the gateway to an expanding universe of Harry Potter, much like George Lucas has done with Star Wars. Unlike Lucas, Rowling will make some of the PotterMore content available for free, as enticement to buy some or all of the digital books she'll make available for sale.
To keep Harry Potter alive in the minds of her aging fans, and to ensure the passing on of the stories to a second generation of HP fans, JK Rowling knows she has to keep producing new content.
In the video above, Rowling admits she has been "hoarding" Harry Potter material, perhaps not another full novel, but presumably quite a few unpublished chapters, or longer versions of chapters already published, plus stories from the pasts of various characters fans already know and love. JK Rowling may never write a Harry Potter sequel, but there will undoubtably be prequels, some may not even be written by her, but instead guided by her and sold on PotterMore.
So why will JK Rowling be the first author to earn a billion from ebook sales?
Because JK Rowling owns the digital publishing rights to her creation. She didn't sign those rights away like so many other well known, and stunningly unsavvy, authors have done in the decade and a half since the first Harry Potter novel was published.
Some of the most successful authors in the world today are battling their publishers for a greater slice of the rapidly rising digital book take. And these authors are pissed off. Publishers are trying to please their mega-sellers by offering 20-35% of digital sales, a vast increase on the standard 10-15% authors get back from the cover price of hardback and paperback sales.
Authors argue, and rightly so, that whatever large expenses footed by the publishers in originally editing, designing, printing, publishing and distributing their paper and cardboard books are figured into the big fat chunk of every book sold that already goes back to the publishers.
Authors, and again rightly so, believe that for the publishing giants like Harper Collins their 60% or more slice of every digital book sold is pretty much all cream.
As JK Rowling becomes, effectively, her own digital publishing company, and as she owns the digital publishing rights to all her novels and characters, she will earn back 90% or more of the price of every digital book she sells at PotterMore. The other ten percent from each digibook sold be mostly soaked up by whoever processes the credit card sales for her (unless she's also planning her own PotterMore digital currency and banking system).
Right now, new digital books by well known authors can range in price from $3 to $15. The major publishers would like a world standard price for a digital novel to be in the $12 to $14.99 range. That's the absurd price they're pushing hard to be established at the moment.
JK Rowling will have no need to be so greedy.
If she charges $10 per Harry Potter digital book, and if she really has no legal obligation to give her print publishers a cut of any kind (which she appears not to have), Rowling will net around $9 for every digital book sold.
To earn $100 million from digital book sales, JK Rowling need only sell 11 milion Harry Potter digital books in a year.
But how many is she likely to sell?
If only 10 percent of all the people in the world who ever brought a Harry Potter novel in print, more than 300 million people, buy just one ebook from PotterMore in the first six months after they become available for sale in October, JK Rowling will earn more than $200 million by April 2012.
Even if she charged only $5 per book, she'll still make more than $100 million by mid-next year.
But JK Rowling could easily entice her fans to pay $10 for each digital book, particularly by including additional or alternate chapters, links to an encyclopedia and video and audio features, for example.
If she gets back $9 from every digibook sold, JK Rowling will reach $1 billion after selling 111,111,111 digibooks, a huge volume, but at 22 million a year over five years not an outrageous amount of digital book sales for the world's most popular novel series.
Will Rowling digitally release all seven already published Harry Potter novels at the same time? Or will she stagger the releases, say a new one every three months? Will Harry Potter addicts be able to one day buy all seven books, with extra stories and material, together, as something like The Complete Harry Potter?
Unknown at this time.
Nobody really knows what digital publishing holds in store next year. Or the year after. It was only three years ago that some of the most successful book publishers in the world sniffed at the coming reality of ebook sales outstripping print sales and laughed it all of never becoming anything of great consequence.
Now JK Rowling is digitally self-publishing, the biggest publishers in the world are in a panic. What if Stephen King decides to publish his new books himself? What if every author on the New York Times bestseller list decides to digitally self-publish? What if every new author who finds enough good reasons to even sign a deal with a major publisher demands a majority royalty deal from their digital books?
It's not an exaggeration to say that the 20th century model of mass market book publishing has been changed forever this year, not solely by JK Rowling of course, but primarily because she is going to show every writer just how valuable it is to hang onto the rights of the most likely highly profitable, long-term revenue stream generated from their stories and their characters : the self-published digital book.
