feedHow to Make a Better Harry Potter Midnight Release Party / A Twelve-Step Guide (Hopefully Helpful for the Release of HP7)
1. You are likely going to have to close your store early so that you can set up for your party. Instead of giving yourself a half hour to set up for the 300 (or more) people about to swarm inside, give yourself an hour or more--that is, close an hour or more before the party is set to begin, even if that means fifteen minutes of paying for your staff to stare at each other before opening the doors. You will look more prepared, and you'll be able to open your doors on time instead of 20 minutes late.
2. There should be some indication that the four people standing outside on the sidewalk are actually judging the costumes if that?s what the four people standing outside on the sidewalk are doing. Yes, I know one was the weatherman, one was the pageant queen, one was a local author (hey, why did nobody ask me?), and one was a store employee, but we thought they were just standing out there to keep people from demanding to enter the store right now. Clipboards? They mean nothing to me. Am I supposed to know their purpose simply by the fact that they have clipboards? I am not so good with legilimency.
4. If you are going to have a sorting hat at the entryway, have alternative options to making it a requirement for all Wizards to be sorted into houses before they enter. This leads to an incredible delay in getting in to the store. Even though the party was to start at 9:00, and the doors opened at around 9:20, we didn't get inside until 9:40, which meant we'd been standing on line for nearly an hour. In case you weren?t tired enough, you will now have to answer the question, "when are we going to get inside" exactly three hundred and forty-six times, at which point you merely want to take your book and go home, but you can't, because you still have two and a half hours before you have to stand in line to get your book. Furthermore, if you are going to sort wizards into houses in the entryway, when a seven year-old boy is told he is a Slytherin, the seven year-old boy's father should have an option to crack the employee who decided he was Slytherin over the head with a beer bottle (at this point I was definitely wanting a beer). Not all seven year old boys want to be Slytherins, and so far you are not winning the hearts and minds of seven year-old boys by putting them into a house that, if they had been it at a real school, would have caused them to drop out in the first twenty minutes. "I want to go back and do it again, even if I have to wait another twenty minutes in line, I don't want to be Slytherin. I can't be Slytherin." Give this boy an out. Let him pick his house. Luckily, a resourceful father and a different employee were able to turn the situation around semi-convincingly (by lying), though the Slytherin-come-Gryffindor was still a bit disappointed in his party experience. Perhaps next time you will offer wizards a choice of houses, or have a way for chaperones to indicate which house the wizard should be placed in. Would it cause any real harm to allow eighty percent of the wizards to be Gryffindors? I doubt it. This is not a real school. Let the kids be who they want to be.
5. If you are going to sort all wizards (see number 4), then have more than one sorting hat. It will not diminish the excitement of the evening. Nobody believes that this is for real. Not really. Nobody believes that that is the one and true sorting hat, and that after they have been sorted they will be Gryffindor forever. But real or not, speeding up the line into the party should be on your to-do list, marked important in big, red letters.
7. If there are to be events within the event for which there are a limited number of attendees who can sign up (such as playing video quidditch), then it should be clear upon entry that this is so, or seven year-olds will go home and tell their parents "it was fun, but I didn't get to do everything I wanted to do," head hanging low, not particularly pleased with his experience.
8. More crystal balls. The line into Professor Trelawny's office was far too long, and the payoff far too small.
9. When someone asks what the symbols on the map man, do not reply, "if you've read the books, you'll know what they mean." I've read all the books twice, and listened to some of them on tape as my son listened. I didn't know what the hell the symbols were supposed to mean, and not everything seemed to be in the place where it was marked on the map. Smart aleck comments after I've just waited forty minutes on line are not appreciated.
10. When you take your children to Chuck E Cheese, they mark your hand with a number, and your child gets the same number on his or her hand, so that the child cannot leave without the appropriate adult. There were more than 300 people inside your building, children roaming without adults, and no real security to speak of besides bookstore employees who were too busy to notice if children were with their chaperone's or not. Just because nothing happened doesn't mean precautions shouldn't be taken. It only takes one missing child for what looks like a small amount of negligence to become an enormous amount of negligence.
12. Don't have a party at all. Bring as many employees in as you want at a quarter to midnight, pay them double-time, and just sell the book. Do we really need an event to buy a book? We don't. The important part of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to me, is reading it to my son. I could care less about the party. I could care less about the jelly beans we won. I just want to be with my son. An even more radical notion might be to not sell the book at all. Don't place a single order. Don't take any special orders. Don't have a party and don't allow yourselves to be taken hostage by the publisher. Don't put yourself in danger of accidentally releasing the book too early. Don't put yourself at risk of breaking the "contract" or the "law" that prevents you from doing so. If somebody asks why you don't carry the book, tell them that if your business relies so heavily on the sales of one title, then you do not have a successful, reliable, or even a viable business. The sales of Harry Potter books do not last forever. They are not every year. They cannot be counted on. And the author has said that the next one is absolutely her last. So let the box stores sell it. They're likely selling it at near a loss anyway. And when the sales rep comes around to ask why you aren't ordering any copies of the biggest book since the Bible, tell them that as soon as the publishing industry stops ruining itself with bloated best-sellers, you'll change your strategy. But until then, you want to sell books, not soda, not beer, not rock stars. Your business is in readers. Creating them, encouraging them, promoting them, catering to them.
A bookstore that builds readers will be successful, even if that business eventually has to shutter its doors.
I've had my say, and probably gone overlong. I should note that I will likely attend the release of HP7, not because I want to but because I'm almost positive my son will want to. And, because, like him, I hate to miss anything, even if what I'm missing would, had I attended, burn cold in my heart.
Blessings.
tags // HarryPotter / Release / Party / HP6 / HP7 / Half-BloodPrince / HalfBloodPrince / Half / Blood / Prince / HarryPotterandtheHalf-BloodPrince
Labels: booklinks, Harry Potter
