It's been 10 years since readers met the boy wizard in Rowling's first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
April 15, 2007 (Press Release) --
More than 300 million copies later, the Potter series ends July 21 when Scholastic Inc. releases the seventh adventure, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
Spartz and his many fellow Webmasters are looking back at their own place on this record-breaking ride. The story of Potter has all along been a story of its fans, and, like everything else about Potter, the fan sites are in a special class, for their size, and for their influence.
"The Potter sites set the standard," says Anthony Ziccardi, vice president and deputy publisher for rival Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that releases "Star Trek" paperbacks.
"The thing about the Potter phenomenon is that it has a huge, active fan base, both young and old, with a lot of teenagers. The 'Star Trek' fan sites are a little bit older most of the fans are 25 and older. The Potter sites really stand out they're like a marketing machine in and of themselves."
The Potter sites have long advanced from the slow pace, simple texts and dull backgrounds of the early years, and now have all the latest accessories: blogs, podcasts, audio and video. They no longer just comment on the news, but participate. Rowling has praised the sites by name, granted them rare interviews, even used one site, the Harry Potter Lexicon, to check facts.
Warner Bros., which once tried to shut down many of the fan sites because of copyright concerns, has invited Spartz and others to the sets of Potter films and premieres, valuing their expertise and, of course, their access to so many fans.
"When we have brought representatives from some of the key fan sites and showed them the details for the film sets, even if some of them were disappointed that we had left out certain elements from the books, they respected what we were trying to do," says Diane Nelson, Warner Bros.' executive vice president for global brand management.
"We're not naive enough to think we're going to avoid criticism, but bringing the fan sites into the process is what we feel is really important."
Melissa Anelli, the Webmaster for another popular fan site, http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, has been part of the online Potter world since 2001, not long after Leaky started, "as a means for a few friends to keep track of all the news about Harry Potter." The first Potter film was coming out, as was the fourth Potter book, so they experimented with a relatively new Web tool: a blog.
"It was a one-page blog, with no other features but news. It had a blue background and Halloween orange text," recalls the 27-year-old Anelli, a freelance journalist who lives in New York. She is writing a book, tentatively titled "Harry, A History," about the Potter phenomenon.
"The movie studio didn't know who we were, and didn't care. It took a year of relentless e-mails and phone calls before someone took me and my questions seriously, and started giving us reportable information," Anelli says. "It took even longer for that open atmosphere to spread to the publishers, but the staff of Leaky felt that it was worth pushing for."
Source: http://movies.yahoo.com
Spartz and his many fellow Webmasters are looking back at their own place on this record-breaking ride. The story of Potter has all along been a story of its fans, and, like everything else about Potter, the fan sites are in a special class, for their size, and for their influence.
"The Potter sites set the standard," says Anthony Ziccardi, vice president and deputy publisher for rival Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that releases "Star Trek" paperbacks.
"The thing about the Potter phenomenon is that it has a huge, active fan base, both young and old, with a lot of teenagers. The 'Star Trek' fan sites are a little bit older most of the fans are 25 and older. The Potter sites really stand out they're like a marketing machine in and of themselves."
The Potter sites have long advanced from the slow pace, simple texts and dull backgrounds of the early years, and now have all the latest accessories: blogs, podcasts, audio and video. They no longer just comment on the news, but participate. Rowling has praised the sites by name, granted them rare interviews, even used one site, the Harry Potter Lexicon, to check facts.
Warner Bros., which once tried to shut down many of the fan sites because of copyright concerns, has invited Spartz and others to the sets of Potter films and premieres, valuing their expertise and, of course, their access to so many fans.
"When we have brought representatives from some of the key fan sites and showed them the details for the film sets, even if some of them were disappointed that we had left out certain elements from the books, they respected what we were trying to do," says Diane Nelson, Warner Bros.' executive vice president for global brand management.
"We're not naive enough to think we're going to avoid criticism, but bringing the fan sites into the process is what we feel is really important."
Melissa Anelli, the Webmaster for another popular fan site, http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, has been part of the online Potter world since 2001, not long after Leaky started, "as a means for a few friends to keep track of all the news about Harry Potter." The first Potter film was coming out, as was the fourth Potter book, so they experimented with a relatively new Web tool: a blog.
"It was a one-page blog, with no other features but news. It had a blue background and Halloween orange text," recalls the 27-year-old Anelli, a freelance journalist who lives in New York. She is writing a book, tentatively titled "Harry, A History," about the Potter phenomenon.
"The movie studio didn't know who we were, and didn't care. It took a year of relentless e-mails and phone calls before someone took me and my questions seriously, and started giving us reportable information," Anelli says. "It took even longer for that open atmosphere to spread to the publishers, but the staff of Leaky felt that it was worth pushing for."
Source: http://movies.yahoo.com
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