"Not close to finishing"

[dr_c]

Until recently, I had sort of been tentatively assuming that JKR would finish the manuscript of Book 7 sometime around the end of this year, and that it would be released sometime in the summer of 2007 (indeed, I was quite fond of the 7/7/07 theory, even while recognizing the uncertainty as to whether the publishers would release the book within a

Comments

[peachespig]

Thanks for the old timelines. That does put things in perspective, and not a particularly good one for next summer. In fact, after reading your post you've convinced me to be even less optimistic than your 50% for summer 2007. :P

My suspicion is that the publishers would at least indeed publish the book relatively promptly rather than delaying to another summer. The last HP book really isn't going to need much help in being a best seller - it pretty much will make its own rules. It doesn't need summertime. I can see them delaying a month or so to better catch the winter holiday rush, though, but not more than that.

I suppose it's possible that "not close to finishing" is an exaggeration to take the pressure off. But I don't think its more than a little exaggeration - she seems to have been pretty happy to honestly report how far along she was in the past, as you demonstrated. So, yeah - I think I'm going to have to start bracing myself for the end of 2007. Alas!

[cynthia_black]

The trouble is, if it isn't released in the summer, then marketing may dictate that it couldn't be released in Autumn 2007 because of the OotP film opening.

Perhaps JKR will make us wait until 31st July 2008 - Harry's birthday would be a rather appropriate release date

[dr_c]

Wait... isn't the movie supposed to be July 13, 2007? Is there some news release that I've missed?

[connielane]

I don't think there's been any clear pattern in previous release cycles with regard to what she says about her progress and what she reveals about the book (i.e., book titles, chapter titles, etc.). She seems a bit mercurial in how much she wants to let people know.

I do think that, like many of us, she might feel that the reality of this being the very last book makes any revelations about its contents - even the title - a much bigger deal than with previous books. I also think this may be an issue of her thinking of HBP and Book 7 as two halves of one book (i.e., we already got our "nuggets" of the last chunk of canon with the HBP revelations and Book 7 is simply the rest of that story).

What makes me stick with the summer '07 guess is her statement that 2006 would be the year in which she writes the last book. Not "start," not "write the bulk of," but "write" - meaning that her plan is to finish it by the end of the year or very shortly after. And she has seemed very positive about her progress this go round.

*keeps hoping*

[dr_c]

Yes, JKR's expectation about "writing it in 2006" is what led me to expect mid-2007 in the first place. But the memory of the three-year wait for OotP has etched it sharply into my memory that producing a book she's happy with is more important to JKR than sticking to a schedule. So I take the "write it in 2006" remark only as a general expectation rather than as a definite plan.

Of course it was shortly after you posted that JKR told us that she really is still undecided about the title! You could still be correct in suspecting that the information flow will be slower in general this time. But still, everything she says sounds like she's a few months away from being where she was with OotP on 9/19/02. (And it could also be argued that, with this being the last one, she won't want to cut short the "tweaking" process

[ada_kensington]

Well, it's not just the fans who seem certain that Book 7 is due for a July 07 release: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9060 Even Scholastic appear to have their fingers crossed. A 07/07/07 release would, after all, be a triumph of marketing. =P

[dr_c]

Thanks for letting me know-- hadn't seen that on Leaky before your post.

(Although, from what Leaky says, it appears READ isn't an official mouthpiece of Scholastic, just a magazine that they publish, or something like that. If they showed it in their Summer '07 catalog, that would be a more serious matter-- it still wouldn't be official until there was an actual news release, but it might reflect the company's actual expectations.)