Incidentally, hype marketing isn't limited to selling HP6. In a breathless press release that sounded more fit for tabloid headlines than for a sober publishing house, Penguin India (sole distributor of HP6 here) had within hours of the book hitting the stores come out with a banner headline screaming: "New Harry Potter smashes all records!" They claim the 1 lakh copies mark has created publishing history in India. "This is a new national record," brags Penguin India's president, Thomas Abraham. Other publishers don't quite agree. "Haven't they heard of Gulshan Nanda's Jheel Ke Us Paar, which sold 10 lakh copies soon after the film was released?" queried one publisher from the pre-Harry Potter days. "And what about Narendar's Shalimar which sold 1,00,000 copies on the first day of the release of the film based on his book? These publishers think books didn't sell till they came along."
Authors aren't over the moon about J.K. Rowling's billion dollar success story either. They claim they make as much money in writing children's book as before: almost nothing. "The only difference Harry Potter's latest has made for me," says Manjula Padmanabhan, author of three children's books, including her latest Unprincess, "is that I get asked all the time if it has made any difference to me."
