Now that the midnight release of the final Harry Potter book has come and gone, it’s interesting to look at what just happened from a marketing perspective.

The build-up to the launch of this last book started almost from the release of book 6, when JK Rowling confirmed #7 would be the final chapter. As the date got closer and closer, the frenzy reached an almost feverish pitch. Book stores scheduled all night Potter Parties and fans of all ages reserved their books for immediate midnight or next morning purchase.

Then we got the inevitable leaks, early releases, threats of lawsuits, etc. What’s fascinating to me is how much this whole phenomenon fed into the marketing machine that has grown up around this craze. Front page stories focused on whether the excerpts posted on the website were in fact real or incorrect versions. The publisher threatened not only those who posted the book early but websites, publishers, stores, etc. who were in any way involved in premature release of the book.

Not that the Harry Potter mania has been a bad thing. The release party at independent bookseller Keplers in Menlo Park took up a full city block and had fans of all ages dressed to the nines as Potter characters, clearly having fun. Anything that gets people in general and kids in particular excited about reading books is a good thing in *my* book.

The big question was whether Harry lives or dies at the end of the final book. Here’s the interesting part. Now that the release has come and gone so has that big question. Most of the mainstream sites, papers, etc. I’ve seen have *NOT* posted the book’s ending now that it’s publicly available. Those that have reviewed the book have done so in a way that does not give away the conclusion.

So the big frenzy about the big ending was only important as long as it was a mystery. Now that millions of copies of the book are available it’s no longer news. But until then, it was a great story that ensured there was virtually no one in the free world who didn’t know about the book’s release Fri at midnight. It probably sold thousands and thousands of additional books. In other words, the threatened early release was the best marketing publisher Scholastic could have asked for.

The new mystery is how do book publishers, sellers and marketers leverage all that hype and hoopla in the future? The really big question is whether the passion around reading that developed as a result of the Harry Potter series continues or dies with The Deathly Hallows. Stay tuned for the next chapter…