Vault Entry #5: Speaking of Spoilers...

This talk of the Harry book getting shipped early (and the hilarity how unused to it HP fans are) has made me revisit the part of the J.K. Rowling interview where we talked about the intense spoiling that happened in the leadup to each book after the third. For those who might not have been around for it, each of the last four books featured some extravagant happenstance that resulted in spoiled contents: there were several for the fourth book (see the last vault entry); for the fifth book the copies purportedly turned up in a field near the publishing plant, and the enterprising person who found them called The Sun instead of, oh, walking them back to the plant or calling the publisher; the fifth book also landed on a health food store's shelf in Brooklyn, NY, where a NY Daily News reporter bought a copy, easy as pie, a few days before publication. All kinds of hell broke loose on seven.

But for six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, something remarkable and terrible happened. There was a gun shootout. We later learned the gun was full of blanks, and the person who shot them should be getting out of jail in a year or so, but at the time imagine the headlines: "Pistol fired over unpublished Potter book." I was in Manhattan when I found out, shopping for some sort of suitable outfit for my pending trip to Edinburgh (a reporter's salary = Strawberry's; a reporter's schedule = roadworn clothing that other reporters don't find objectionable because their shirt has three holes in it too, and neither of you have shopped since before you got your job) when Lizo Mzimba from the BBC called. I had six hangers on my left pinky and four hangers on my right and when he told me I screamed "What?!" then made an unfortunate, yet knee-jerk gesture. Everything fell to the floor. A shootout over a Harry Potter book. Seriously.

(A quick recap: A Sun reporter was called to a meeting with someone who claimed he had a copy and would sell it for about 50,000 pounds; he brought the police, and two shots were fired.)

This event and the circumstances are in Harry, A History, but here's some fuller comment from Jo about the circumstances and the feelings of tension that surrounded the release at that point.

(I've edited myself out of the conversation.)

The quote starts talking about the book five field incident:

"I remember there was a journalist, a TV journalist, who said at the time, very flippantly, 'Ha, ha, it's all publicity, isn't it?" It just felt so out of control at that point, just felt so out of control that the manuscript had suspiciously turned up in a field, that this guy who had supposedly found it just thought, 'Oh, well, the best thing I can do here is phone some newspaper. ... And then of course we hit book six and we think we've seen the most out-there attempt to get a Harry Potter manuscript early, and of course we haven't come close because the we get the guy with the gun. That was pretty serious, that really was not funny. Fiddy told me and I thought it was a joke. I thought she was making a joke.

Just the mere fact that you've produced something that people want to steal, want to put on the Internet, is, for me, very uncomfortable. And when a gun gets involved, the joke's gone out the window. Completely out of the window. I was appalled. The guy who had the gun pulled on him wrote that he'd been in places like Kosovo and it went through his head, "I'm going die for Harry Potter." God forbid.

There is a view out there, 'It's all good,' it all adds to the hype, makes it more colorful. But no, it was really getting out of control. And as people talked about hype it was feeding off of itself, and it was generating this kind of ugliness...that's way beyond leaking plots, that's into violence and intimidation, and who wants to be associated with that? Who wants their work associated with that? You know, let's just publish it two weeks early. Who wants a gun pulled? So you start to get very anxious about it. ... At that level, it's become utterly divorced from what it's about. It's not about the anticipation for a book at all, it's not about love of a story or even wishing to spoil a story. It's become something that people want to be attached to because it's the quickest way they can see to get some publicity for themselves or notoriety for themselves and you have this fringe - I can't dignify them with the word fan because I think if it wasn't Harry Potter it would be Star Wars or it would be something high-profile enough that they could just get a little bit of face-time. ... it's really got nothing to do with Harry Potter, and yet Harry Potter attracted a large amount of that, latterly, I'd say, for the last three books. ... It's raising expectations in an unhealthy way, it's making people sick of the sound of Harry Potter for the wrong reasons, and most seriously you're getting into the realm of literally fraud, intimidation, violence, theft, and nearly always it had nothing to do with fandom.