News from the Bloomsbury analyst

News from the Bloomsbury analyst meeting at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (investment bank) today on Harry Potter Five

Well, sad to say, but it does not look very promising for even a 2002 release of “The Order of the Phoenix.” Today was the presentation of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 2001 annual report, which was followed by a big analyst meeting at the named investment bank. These meetings give us the best chance to get news and predictions on further developments in a company. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein also acts as Bloomsbury’s corporate broker, so what they say about the company is directly from the source and it does not sound like anything we had expected:

The bank doesn’t expect a new Harry Potter book to be released this year, Menzies-Gow, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, said. The company may wait until next year to release the next book in the series — “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” — because a new film set for release this year will boost sales of existing titles.

“Why publish a new book if you get free global advertising that will have a positive effect on your existing books?” he said. “Why not wait until, say, March next year to release a new book and get all the benefit from that one as well?” Bloomsbury hasn’t said when the new book will be published.

Well, supporting this statement is a message we got from a contact at Ingram books, a leading wholesale distributor of books to booksellers, saying that Bloomsbury would have confirmed that HP5 will not be out this year. We got this message before the analyst meeting had started.

On a more optimistic note… a TLC reader got a letter from J.K. Rowling personally: “One of the things Mrs. Rowling wrote was that she hopes book 5 will “be published later this year”.” But it looks as if it is not in JKR’s power to have the final word on the release date. Let’s hope the best.