It’s been a long time since the literary world has seen a book launch that has felt like a real “event” quite like it did this week. Not since the Deathly Hallows has there been quite such a frenzy as there has been around the launch of A Court of Splintered Harmony.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This is of course the sixth book in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, which has played a huge part in driving the emergence and dominance of romantasy as a genre. Let’s have a look at the numbers. According to the Bookseller, there were 300 midnight launch parties in the UK, 150 of them through Waterstones branches. In the US and Canada meanwhile, there were 1,500 with 150,000 tickets sold.
Those are eye-watering numbers. There are no total numbers for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows back in July 2007, but for large chains it seems there were nearly 300 in UK Waterstones stores and 1,200 in Borders (I miss Borders!). It’s probably fair to say that a comparison across twenty years reflects the growth of independent stores, and in particular those independent stores dedicated to single genres.
What Indies Can Take from This
Obviously Sarah J. Maas is published by Bloomsbury. But what do we take from this as indies? Well, first, there is the same caution I urged with the phenomenal crowdfunding success of Brandon Sanderson.
That said, both Sanderson and Maas illustrate something that indies are also doing exceptionally well: forging deep relationships with devoted fans. They are offering those fans more than solitary time with characters they love. They are supporting the building of a community. What is really different from a few years ago, though, is the infrastructure that’s there to support authors wanting to nurture such communities. And it’s not just digital infrastructure. The strength of independent booksellers not just willing but wanting to work with indie authors, through events and exclusive editions for example, affords easier access than has traditionally been available to the tools of community building.
Unlike previous releases in the series, we have only three months to wait until the January 27 release of the seventh and final ACOTAR book, which will give us some very interesting comparative figures.
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