Technology, marketplace enable unprecedented sales

NEW YORK -- Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the former head of Warner Books, remembers publishing one of the biggest sensations of its time: Alexandra Ripley's "Scarlett," the authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind."

Ripley's novel, with its answer to a decades-old tease -- whether Scarlett and Rhett end up together -- was a guaranteed instant best seller. And it deserved the fullest first printing the market could handle, in 1991: 500,000 copies.

The rollout for the final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," makes the fuss for "Scarlett" look primitive. Potter's first printing was 12 million. After 24 hours, worldwide sales had topped 10 million, with 8.3 million in the United States.

But the numbers do more than capture the special appeal of "Deathly Hallows": They reflect how the market has changed. Production and communication systems were far slower at the time of "Scarlett," Amazon.com did not exist, superstores were getting started and price clubs weren't selling nearly as many books.

"With 'Potter,' you have almost a perfect storm of events," said Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins. "You have changes in technology and capacity, the synergy that worked so effectively between the books and the movies, and, most importantly, ... they were books of startling quality."

"I surely would hesitate before trying to do something like 12 million copies for Dan Brown's next book, but thanks largely to 'Potter,' we can think about numbers we wouldn't have imagined before," said Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, which released the mega-selling "The Da Vinci Code."

The release of "Deathly Hallows" was a timed worldwide gala, with the guest of honor embargoed until midnight.

Scholastic's planning began at least a year ago, when Colaneri began consulting with printers about possible production dates. Thanks to digital scanning (instead of using film), the time spent getting a template ready was cut in half from a decade ago.

Scholastic benefited from technology that didn't exist or wasn't widely used in the 1990s. E-mail allowed lengthy, complex documents to be transmitted instantly, and satellite tracking allowed the publisher to know the exact location of every delivery truck.