Shipping Harry Potter:
How do they do that?

by Michele Regenold

Floo powder, portkeys, and broomsticks. Great for transporting witches and wizards but not so great for transporting stuff—like the millions of new Harry Potter books that will be shipped this summer.

In 2005 when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the series, was released, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours. There’s a pretty good chance that the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will break that record.

How will Scholastic, the American publisher of J. K. Rowling’s wildly popular series, make sure all those books get to stores by July 21, 2007, the book’s release date? They’re not saying. But, aside from the security issues and large quantities, the shipping process is probably similar to what other publishers do.

How new books are usually ferried about

HarperCollins is one of the largest book publishers in the world and has been an innovator in getting books to its customers. Other book publishers have either partnered with HarperCollins to help distribute books or followed its lead.

First, HarperCollins doesn’t just send its new books willy-nilly to book stores or Wal-Mart. Stores order the new books they want, even before they’re printed. They find out about upcoming new books from the publisher’s catalog and sales representatives and from reviews of new books in magazines like Publisher’s Weekly and The Horn Book.

They may also get to see an advance reader copy, or ARC, which is a soft-cover version of a book whose errors haven’t all been fixed yet. Publishers print a few hundred ARCs several months before a new book is released and send them to book reviewers to help generate interest in the books. ARCs were printed of Harry Potter books through book three.

The publisher takes orders for new books before they’re printed, which helps them decide how many books to print. For a book by a first-time author with no sales record, a publisher may print 10,000 copies. For a book by a known author with a great sales record, a publisher may print hundreds of thousands of copies or even millions of copies if it’s a sure-fire hit.

If a book gets good reviews and generates “buzz,” it’s more likely that people will want to buy it. So more stores will order it.

Once the books are printed and bound and dressed up in their dust jackets, they’re packed in cardboard cartons. The cartons are loaded on to wooden pallets (a two-level platform with space between the levels for the metal arms of a forklift). A forklift loads the pallets onto the trailer of a semi truck.

The truck hauls the books to HarperCollins’s special distribution center for new books, which is on the East Coast. HarperCollins has a separate distribution center for handling its backlist—books that have been in print for years and are continually reprinted as needed.

Thousands of new books are printed each year, so it’s not practical for each new book to get its own unique release date. At the new book distribution center, 50 to 120 different new books may be combined for a new title release, says HarperCollins Vice President of Customer Service Dan Holod. New books always have an “on sale date,” usually a Tuesday. That way a customer in Portland, Oregon, can pick up a new book the same day as a customer in New York City.

The process for releasing new titles takes 20 days, Holod says, from the day they gather all the titles until the day they go on sale. Holod says it takes this long because some customers have to redistribute the books to their own customers, such as a discount chain distributing to individual stores.

HarperCollins follows about 36 different shipping schedules for every release. Most orders ship via UPS, as long as they’re under 500 pounds. HarperCollins ships especially large orders by freight carriers directly to customers’ receiving centers. The chain bookstore Borders, for example, receives books from publishers at its own distribution centers in California, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, and then ships them to individual stores.  

The distance that books have to be shipped is also a factor in the release process. From the East Coast to the West Coast, it may take seven days to ship books.

Special treatment for special books

Some books get special treatment. Highly anticipated books by writers like J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket (author of the 13-book A Series of Unfortunate Events) and books that are being released (or re-released) to coincide with a film release, like The Da Vinci Code, Charlotte’s Web, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, are usually shipped in far greater quantities. They also ship by themselves. No mingling with other new titles.

Often these books get shipped straight from the bindery to larger customers without stopping at the publisher’s distribution center. This saves time, money (freight expense), work (receiving the books at an intermediate point), and space.

“But the most important and different factor about a special release,” says Dan Holod with HarperCollins, “are the affidavits that we require those customers to sign if they need to receive books early.” By signing it, they promise not to sell or display the special book before its designated time.

“If they break that date,” says Holod, “we are careful not to allow them to receive the next special release early.”

Scholastic used a similar affidavit for the release of the sixth Harry Potter book in 2005 and is requiring it again for the seventh book this summer.

Why would book stores want these special books early, especially since they have to keep them securely stored until the release date? One word—sales.

Elizabeth Bluemle, co-owner of Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont, says, “Booksellers MUST have the book by the day before the on-sale date so that we can start selling it the minute the clock turns to midnight.”

Having the books early means stores can plan special events in the wee hours the day of the release. Like Harry Potter costume parties.

“Pretty much 90% of our sales of a new Harry Potter book come the first week,” Bluemle says. “After that, it drops off tremendously. So if a store doesn’t get the books in time to sell them on [the release date], it’s losing out in a huge way.”

Delivery to your door

In 2005, Amazon.com received more than 1.5 million advance orders for the sixth Harry Potter novel. According to Amazon, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivered “hundreds of thousands of copies” on July 16, 2005, the release date.

Amazon hasn’t announced yet that it will offer delivery of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on July 21, 2007, this year’s release date, but Amazon spokesperson Sean Sundwall says the announcement will probably be made in the next several weeks.

Amazon offers many of its media products, like film DVDs and music CDs as well as books, for delivery on the product’s release date. Sundwall says, “We’re very familiar with the process.”

To make a release date delivery of Harry Potter happen, Amazon negotiates with the publisher and with shippers, such as UPS and USPS.

For Harry Potter release date deliveries in 2003 and 2005, “Communication was key—during planning, preparation, lead-up, and actual deliveries,” says USPS spokesperson Yvonne Yoerger. Amazon.com and the other shippers gave the USPS updates of how many books were ordered. “Early on it was weekly,” Yoerger says. “Closer to delivery, it was daily so that we knew the volume of books to expect and what regions would be expecting the most deliveries.”

To keep track of all this, “electronic information is essential,” Yoerger says. It’s gathered through barcode scanning, including barcodes on trucks, pallets inside the trucks, larger containers of grouped and sorted packages in sacks (barcodes are on tags holding the sacks closed), and on individual packages at final delivery.

The USPS coordinated closely with companies shipping books to postal facilities. One factor was geography—where companies were shipping from and to. Amazon has several warehouses, called fulfillment centers, around the country, from which products are shipped.

Another factor was the amount of pre-sorting and preparation Amazon and other companies completed on their shipments before delivering them to the USPS. This allowed companies to bypass some postal processing and save time. Yoerger says that most book shipments delivered to “destination delivery units”—the final stop before the local post office—were dropped off on Friday for Saturday delivery. Shipments at some other processing plants had to be dropped off Thursday, depending on delivery factors and geography.

Shippers’ main concern was that books not be delivered early. In 2005, Amazon used white boxes with green lettering for its UPS shipments to help drivers not deliver early. Packages going through the USPS were clearly marked “Please deliver on July 16” and some had bright green stickers. Yoerger says that samples of the packages were shown to postal employees ahead of time.

Considering all the excitement about the release of a new Harry Potter novel, no wonder security was and is tight.

About the jobs

Getting books distributed efficiently takes a lot of different people doing many different kinds of work, including packing orders, driving forklifts, tracking inventory, managing electronic information systems, and driving delivery trucks, to name a few. Some jobs require a high school education and some a four-year degree.
 
Check out the following links to learn more about distribution jobs with

• HarperCollins
• UPS
• US Postal Service