Harry Potter, 'Adult' edition

[Dauphin]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747569401/ref=pd_ir_b_h_/026-4906245-1884467

Synopsis
Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. "It is time," he said, "for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry"

Getting passed the obvious joke.....



The difference between the 'Adult' version and the 'Childrens' version is the cover art. Perhaps an advertising guru like Ming or rah could explain how much of a difference targeting different audiences in this way would work. It seems either incredibly clever or incredibly stupid and I can't decide which.

I can just imagine many people buying this under false pretenses as its the 'Adult' version and probably in the 'Adult' section of book stores.

[Urban Ranger]

Adult version with no sex and no violence? Bah!

[Stuie]

Funny thing is, I know lots of adults who have read all the Harry Potter books, but I know no one under the age of 18 that has. Maybe I'm just travelling in the wrong circles.

[Paul Hanson]

Same here. I can think of three people who have read all four previous books; my mate's 17 year old sister, his mum, and my mum.

Mums seem to lap this stuff up.

[rah]

Hmmm.
My daughter and wife have read all the Harry Potters. They are not the genre that they usually read. On the other hand, 75% of what I read can be found in the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore, yet I have never read any of the Harry Potter books and have no real desire to. While most SF and Fantasy is generally marketed towards a younger crowd, they really try hard not to have it perceived as a children's book. Why limit your potential market? I never read the Narnia books until college (course assignment) because I thought they were children books. I was surprised that I enjoyed them. When the first Harry Potter book made it's splash, 90% of the reviews pegged it as a children's book. It wasn't till later that the number of adults that read it was really mentioned.

Well anyway, maybe the intent here is to attract one of the many people like myself that haven't read the series because of the perception that it was a Kid's story. If I had never heard of it before and saw it on the self, I probably would have bought it, but my perception that it was a children's book, has always stopped me.

RAH
I doubt that this most recent attempt will sway me.

[Jon Miller]

well, we are talking about what, a day?, for the first book

so it would be something easy to try

Jon Miller

[Stuie]

The only reason I read Harry Potter was because my wife and I did this thing where she picked a book that I had to read (Harry Potter) and I picked a book that she had to read (The Hobbit). I ended up finishing all four Potter books before she finished The Hobbit, but now she's a LOTR maniac - she's seen both movies multiple times and just finished reading Fellowship of the Ring. Now she's taking an Amy Tan break prior to reading Two Towers.

Anyway, give the first book a try, RAH. It's a pretty good read.

[Ming]

Using different covers to target different audiences can sometimes help increase sales. Results vary...

TV Guide has often used different covers depending on the region of the country to increase sales. Since a lot of TV Guides are sold on the newstands, it has proven to be effective. Some sports publications also used to do this and it has also worked for them. They would put local sports star on the cover in the appropriate region and sales increased dramitically.

Star Wars was the "King" of doing this with books. But they weren't really going after different audiences by putting different characters on the cover... they were just trying to sucker Star War geeks into buying more than one copy of the same book... and it actually worked...

This might help the Harry Potter series... But I wonder if it will really help now. I don't really think there is a general perception anymore that it's just a kids series.
Time will tell.

[loinburger]

Damn, I thought that this thread was about Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody or Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel.

[monolith94]

"I don't really think there is a general perception anymore that it's just a kids series."
Exactly. At the college I go to, if you sit down at a random table at lunch and start talking about the new Harry Potter book, chances are considerably in your favor that the rest of the table will join in.
I'm wondering what the difference between the adult and children's version will be.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Adult version with no sex and no violence? Bah!

No violence? What have you been reading?

And I dunno about the no sex. Harry might start to get his mojo working for Cho .

[monolith94]

One can only hope...

[St Leo]

Darn, I thought this was about Hermione hentai. Not that there is such a thing...

[monolith94]

Dude, if there's hentai of Misty from pokemon, I'm sure there's gotta be some of Hermione...
Not that I know anything about that.

[Charlemagne120]

But hey misty was a fox