Will Cursed Child Change the Script Publishing Business?

Cursed Child may be topping bestseller lists, but that doesn’t mean there will be an influx of plays on bookshelves any time soon.

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Shakespeare may be the exception to the rule that there’s little market for scripts, but Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is certainly making a place for itself on bookshelves. As the eighth story in the seven-book series, Cursed Child can’t lose when it comes to sales, as demonstrated by the fact that it was Barnes & Noble’s most preordered book since Deathly Hallows hit shelves in 2007, and the script now joins its predecessors on bestseller lists across the board.

Considering its origins, it’s no surprise that Cursed Child has swept so successfully through bookstores and other retailers, but still impressive that it’s topped the charts after almost ten years without another fully-fledged Harry Potter story in sight. This could potentially mean big things for the script-publishing business as a whole, but sources are split as to whether or not that’s going to happen. After all, Harry Potter is popular in its own right, in any medium, but generally speaking, play scripts just don’t sell like books do. According to Christopher Gould, who works in publishing/licensing at Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., scripts are usually sold for academic study, not entertainment. He explains, “A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to reading a play. Like, ‘I don’t know how to read this.’”

True, reading a play leaves much of the story open to more personal interpretation, stage direction notwithstanding. Readers are left to decide what the staging looks like without any real description and, without dialogue tags, it’s up to us to decide precisely how something is said, which can change certain character and plot dynamics. It’s said that plays are meant to be seen, not read; so when you do have to read them, there’s cause for some confusion.

Piles of the new Harry Potter script book ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One

If nothing comes of it on a wider scale, Cursed Child has still been a unique experience for booksellers. Since marketing a play rather than a book is a new avenue for most publishers, it helps that this particular script has such a long and storied foundation. Ellie Berger, president of Trade Publishing, said of the matter, “J.K. Rowling has created such a vivid world that when you read this book in script form it doesn’t change the story or the world. It doesn’t feel like a different experience.”

That’s where we must agree to disagree, I’m afraid. After reading Cursed Child, it seems as though the best parts of this play are the visuals; the bare bones of the narrative, meanwhile, leave so much to be desired that I’m not surprised that most reviews have lauded the special effects and only grazed the tip of the story itself. Reading Cursed Child was an entirely different experience than reading the Harry Potter series, mostly because the original series was actually good. It seems that you can get away with a lack in quality so long as you attach “Harry Potter” to the label.

None of this means that the script-publishing business will fail in light of Cursed Child’s release—quite the contrary, if you ask me. If any future production generates the kind of buzz Cursed Child has, the producers will certainly remember how this particular play topped bestseller lists, and maybe they’ll give the book market a go for themselves. Perhaps the buzz can be credited entirely to Harry Potter’s famous name, but Harry’s not the end of cultural phenomenons; if his onstage presence can be successfully marketed on-the-page, there will be other characters who can do the same.

Next: Cursed Child Plans Talks to Move to Broadway

At this point, it’s really a toss-up as to whether or not Cursed Child’s success as a script book will mean the same for other productions. The script has certainly sold well, but as fans and reviewers are split as to how well the play translates to the page, perhaps the muddled reviews will be enough to discourage other productions from stepping their toes in printed editions.

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