Hurry, Harry. The Muggles are getting restless.
To be sure, the movie version of the second Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, will open today to enormous crowds.
But readers who crave a new adventure with the boy wizard and his pals, rather than revisiting Harry via the screen, are growing impatient.
Sixth-grader Lily Wilkinson of Durham, Conn., is "really bummed" that the fifth book in the planned series of seven has been delayed two years.
"I'm not as interested as I was," says Lily, 11, "and I won't be as interested when it does come out." Her friends are "a little fed up," too, she says. "It's anticlimactic."
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, originally due out in the summer of 2001, has been repeatedly delayed, and optimists are talking about a spring 2003 publication. Possibly the delay is due to Rowling's marriage to Dr. Neil Murray last December and her subsequent pregnancy, a lengthy plagiarism lawsuit she eventually won, or perhaps simply her determination to work on the book for as long as it takes to perfect it.
"She's tweaking and polishing," says Judy Corman, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, the series' U.S. publisher. Once the publisher receives the manuscript, it will take about five months for the book to reach stores.
The first book was published in 1997, sold 23 million copies, took up apparently permanent residence on the New York Times best-seller list and was turned into a movie. The four books published so far have sold about 150 million copies worldwide and about 72 million here and have been translated into 47 languages, says Corman.
The Potter franchise, unique for a children's book, is so lucrative that Corman and other industry analysts hesitate to estimate how much it is worth. It has topped $1 billion and is still growing. The first movie alone sold more than $961 million worth of tickets worldwide, second only to Titanic, and $100 million more in related merchandise. And that doesn't count the books, which include four hardcover, four softcover and two mass-market paperback versions.
Corman says the new movie, paperback versions and boxed sets, along with holiday bookstore promotions, have kept interest alive. And, she says, new readers keep coming along.
"Whenever it is published," she says of Rowling's fifth book, "it will be an event. We didn't really see it as a series [like The Babysitters Club books]. It's seven books - substantive books. We hope her readers are patient."
Carole Goldberg writes for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.