НИИ «Гарри Поттер»

Harry Potter may be all the rage in Moscow’s movie theaters, but until last summer the young English wizard was virtually unknown in Russia. Mikhail Markotkin is the man responsible for bringing Potter to Russia. Chairman of ROSMAN, the largest children’s book publisher in the country, Markotkin is the publisher of the Harry Potter series in Russian.
Introducing the young wizard to the local audience was not as easy as Markotkin’s Western counterparts may have anticipated, but he waged an active campaign to make Potter fashionable. And he is. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — the fourth book in the series — is due to come out April 20 with a print run of 1 million. The man behind the Potter craze recently spoke to The Moscow Times.

Q:How did you get involved with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series?
A: We got interested in Harry Potter in 2000 when his popularity in the West had already peaked, but we were aware there were risks involved. Firstly, the genre we call fantasy is not very popular in our country. Sales normally do not exceed 10,000 copies per book. Then there are the considerations that the hero is English, the theme is magic. But we spent a lot of time thinking the project through. We contacted author Joan Rowling’s agent, persuaded him to choose us from among several [other publishers], and in April 2000 we signed a contract.

Q: If Harry Potter was unknown here, how did you start introducing the book?
A: It all happened in a curious way. When we asked our Western partners to give us some advice on how to popularize the book, they said, ‘Don’t do anything, the books will sell themselves.’ But we did not believe that. We knew that if we did nothing we would never reach the level of recognition and sales to which we aspired. So we created a special task force to promote Harry Potter, planning for a campaign to last several years. We went to schools and introduced Potter there. We organized lotteries and competitions. We used every opportunity to talk to journalists about Harry’s adventures. We went on television and radio.

After one year the name Harry Potter began to sound familiar. The book was published and it sold well in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, but not in the provinces. The provinces are a story in themselves. We used every chance we got to persuade stores to take the books. We promised special price reductions. We guaranteed to take back the copies if they failed to sell them.

Q: And what was the reaction from the provincial stores? 
A: They also took risks. For example, Novosibirsk’s Top Kniga asked us to ship them 5000 copies, then 7,000 more, then another 10,000, and finally 20,000 more. By then we had already run out of books. And since the opening of the Harry Potter movie last month, sales in the provinces have gone up even more.

We made a record for one-day sales in December 2001: 50,000 copies. Moscow’s Biblio Globus alone sold 2,100 copies that day — a record for them.

Q: Do you distribute Harry Potter in English? 
A: Not yet, but we are pleased that the English version of Harry Potter is now recommended in schools for those who want to learn English.

Q: Has Harry contributed in a big way to your company’s bottom line? 
A: Yes, but only starting this year. Until then we were investing in the project.

Q: I have heard there is a bitter controversy over the translation? Can you tell us about it? 
A: The first book was translated by Igor Oransky and the next two by Marina Litvinova. Opinions are divided. Some readers like the first and some like the second translator. What stuns me is the campaign on the Internet — several unauthorized translations are circulating on the web and are recommended by Russian portals. This is piracy, disrespect of copyright law and private property.

Q: Have you read the books personally? 
A: Yes, the first novel kept me up until 4 a.m. It is a fantastic book. And I am excited that children are ready to wait for several months until the next Harry Potter novel comes out later this month.

Q: How long has ROSMAN been in business? 
A: My partner Yevgeny Sosnovsky and I founded it 10 years ago. At that time private publishing houses had begun to pop up. In university I studied graphic arts — I knew how to produce a book but I didn’t know how to sell one. But in those days the book market was empty; there was no problem selling books — the problem was making them.

Q: Why did you decide to go into children’s literature? Was it for personal or for business reasons? 
A: Both Yevgeny and I had small children and we knew which books were missing on our bookshelves. We hoped to fill the gap. At that time books were being sold rather primitively. We took our editions from the printing line straight to the stores. We had print runs of up to 200,000 when books were normally printed 10,000 at a time.

In 1994 we took a big step into the unknown and started producing popular science books for children, and we had great results. Editions ran up to 300,000.

Q: Do you have outlets outside Moscow? 
A: No, our firm is based in downtown Moscow, where we have 400 employees. Our turnover is about $20 million annually. The economic crisis of 1998 hit us badly, but our partners abroad helped us to withstand the shock.

Q: Did it take you a long time to come out of the crisis? 
A: No, it was rather fast. At first people were in shock and stopped buying books; they needed money to buy necessities. But then they saw books as cheap entertainment and started buying books again.

Q: How would you characterize the situation in the book industry now? 
A: Ever since 1999 we have been experiencing a big increase in production and sales. The proportion of cheap literature gets smaller and the market share of serious and educational literature is on the increase.

There are several important questions facing the industry today. Bookstores in the provinces have closed. It has become too expensive to ship books around the country, and this limits our growth potential. But starting this year we have seen the formation of several book distribution companies that are shipping books around the country.

Q: Are you optimistic about the book trade in Russia? 
A: I think we all should work together to restore the book market — authors, publishers and bookstores — and to make more money for everybody.

Q: And what can you say about the assortment of books now on offer? 
A: If you take a bookstore like Moscow’s Biblio-Globus, they stock something like 50,000 titles in their store. Compare that to the 2,000 titles they had in 1989 and you can see the progress our industry is making.