Hail Harry -- Independents Revel in the Release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Booksellers all knew it would be big, but no one really knew just how big…. By sunset on June 21, the longest day of the calendar year, over five million copies of the longest book most people will ever read were sold around the country. Kids who previously needed naps after 10 pages of The Red Badge of Courage, stayed up through the night to finish the 870-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Following the weekend of staggering sales, retailers nationwide were clamoring for more copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. On Wednesday, June 25, Scholastic announced that it was going back to press for a third printing of 800,000 copies of Harry V.
John Burdett wanted to capture a place that hadn't been explored all that much in previous detective thrillers. "I thought Bangkok really hadn't been done the way Los Angeles, New York, and Paris had been done," he told BTW. His original intention was to write a relatively conventional book.