Marketing and all things related

While Vladimir Putin may have been named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2007, I'm a marketer, not a politician, so I'm more interested in this year's runner-up, J.K. Rowling.  Just yesterday, I published a year in review post where I talked about one of my favorite hot marketing topics for 2007, Harry Potter, so I was very interested in who Time named Person of the Year. 

J.K. Rowling wrapped up a long chapter of her life and the lives of millions and millions of readers with the release of the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007.  Never has a book or series of books sold even close to the same number of copies as quickly as Harry Potter did.  The series made J.K. Rowling the first billionaire author in history, and today, she is ranked as the second most powerful woman in entertainment behind Oprah Winfrey.

While J.K. Rowling has stated emphatically that there will not be an eighth book in the Harry Potter series, she did plant a seed of hope for more stories about the wizarding world she created and our world embraced.  In her interview with Time magazine, she hinted at the possibility of returning to that world in the future.  Here's an excerpt from Time:

Rowling has some rebuilding of her own to do. Her time, she says, will be divided among her children, her charities and her writing. But she has only to look at George Lucas to appreciate that the pressure to return to Hogwarts will be ferocious — and some of it self-inflicted. She's already had to cope with the pressure of not disappointing the fan closest to her: her daughter Jessica, 14. What will happen when her two younger children a decade from now discover the stories for themselves and know that Mom has the power to make more of them? "There have been times since finishing, weak moments," she says, "when I've said, 'Yeah, all right,' to the eighth novel." But she's convinced she's doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She's working on two projects now, an adult novel and a "political fairy tale." "If, and it's a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character," she says. "I feel like I've already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years and see how we feel then."

Over 400 million copies of the seven books in the Harry Potter series have sold throughout the world so far and the first five movies have brought in over $4 billion.  The Harry Potter brand, itself, is estimated to be worth $4 billion making it comparable to some big corporate brands. 

2007 certainly was a big year for J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter brand even if Rowling wasn't named Time magazine's Person of the Year.  The important thing to take away from this is that J.K. Rowling might write another book about the wizarding world of Harry Potter someday!