Comments on: Harry Potter Secrets: REVEALED AT LAST!

By: rpwagner

rpwagner — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:55:14 +0000

thats the same when you eat an apple. At the end you dont have nothing, you have eat everything. You have destruct to construct. But differently, when we eat a candy, we still have the package. That we can do something with it.

i dont know if I’m clear, but when you read a book, it ends in itself, it goes directly to the shelf. And this end in itself is a kind of strange in our consumer contemporaneous society, where we always have something after the deconstruction phase.

By: Jeff Podoshen

Jeff Podoshen — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 17:02:31 +0000

I have to agree with Prof. Brown on this one. Scholastic got exactly what it wanted… and how much did they have to pay for it? It’s kind of like watching the Paris Hilton drama unfold (now don’t get me wrong I really can’t stand her alleged “music” but the drama is rather fascinating to watch) - how much does Ms. Hilton have to spend to promote herself? I was recently in Thailand, and I flipped on my one English language channel - the BBC - and what was the lead news story? Yup, Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton, the lead freakin story on the BBC. So while artists who have actually spent years honing their precious craft must shell out thousands in promotional fees, media whores (hmmm… literal sense of the word here?) can get their schlock promoted simply by manipulating the like of the BBC with “news stories” that hardly affect Ms. Hilton’s next door neighbors, let alone the global masses. I for one, am saddened that this well-orchestrated strategy is now the norm. And there’s no well in Hades that Scholastic didn’t know what they were doing.

By: Robert Kozinets

Robert Kozinets — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 13:09:53 +0000

Stephen Brown commented to me in an email:

“Thanks for the promo for Wizard! It’s very much appreciated. As for the secrecy business you discuss on the blog, it’s increasingly my belief that the secrecy tactic itself is the cause of the secrecy breaches we’ve seen. Harry’s handlers have made such a big deal about keeping things secret, that they virtually invite spoilers, hackers, media leaks and all the rest.

The Sopranos finale was successfully kept secret, when it could easily have received the Potter treatment and leaked out. But because the Sopranos’ producers didn’t make an enormous issue of it, the media respected the need for circumspection. In effect, Potter’s people are spitting in the face of the media – we don’t trust you people to keep things under wraps – and the media spits back at them. They brought this on themselves, in my view. But let’s not forget that the kafuffle’s great publicity, free publicity and helps sell books by the shedload. Isn’t that what Scholastic’s all about?”