If you fancy a flutter in the stock market, you should consider buying into Bloomsbury. The publisher's share-price rose this week on the news that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the concluding volume in J K Rowling's phenomenal series, would appear on July 17. But the price remains at only just above the level to which it had sunk following a profit warning before Christmas, and surely will climb as Harry Potter fever takes over the UK.
Some analysts think that Harry's heyday is past. They are going to be proved spectacularly wrong - as spectacularly wrong as Bloomsbury was when it forked out a million quid for David Blunkett's memoirs. Each Harry Potter novel has set new records, which at the time had appeared to be unbreakable. Volume five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), sold 1.7 million copies in a day. We thought that it would not be physically possible to shift more units in that time; but then came Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005), selling more than 2 million copies on day one. By the end of 2005, that figure stood at 3.6 million.
Now we await HP7. What is Snape's role? What will happen to Malfoy? What will happen to Ron and Hermione? And the big questions: will Voldemort be defeated; and will Harry survive? Don't tell me that this book is not going to be enormous. It will be the biggest publishing event we have ever seen.
Bloomsbury will be buoyant again, and it will amass a huge amount of cash to add to its considerable stockpile. Whether it will be an investment for the longer term is less obvious. Clearly, it will not sustain the level of profitability that the appearance of a new Harry Potter novel provides. The question concerns rather its ability to develop into an independent company robust enough to compete with giants such as Hachette, Random House, HarperCollins and Penguin.
The Blunkett flop is not very significant. Personality publishing of this kind is a high-risk business, in which there is rarely any middle ground between success and disaster. Bloomsbury made a disastrous decision with Blunkett, but chose well when it paid a similar sum for Sheila Hancock's memoir - a book about which, before it became a number one bestseller, various wiseacres were highly sceptical. Every publisher, including those of some of the bestselling titles of 2006, has several Blunkett-esque embarrassments on its lists.
What matters much more is Bloomsbury's investment in longer term projects. Here, its record is much healthier. It continues to win awards - most recently, the Whitbread Novel award with William Boyd's Reckless. It is gaining strength in the US, and succeeding in buying world rights in important titles. It has always invested in reference publishing, which offers a steady and profitable hedge against the vagaries of the general market.
Bloomsbury is a fair bet. And Harry Potter is a banker.
