Rowling, Inc.'s Biggest Gaffe Ever?

The Yo-Yo Pre-Publication Releases of Running Grave's Opening Chapters

This post is spoiler free.

Running Grave, the seventh Cormoran Strike novel, is out and my two copies of the much anticipated novel arrived earlier this morning. I have written and posted seven Placeholder Posts on signature topics over on the weblog, no spoilers of course, on which comment threads Serious Strikers can share the gaffes they have discovered, the parallels with other books, the alchemical notes, and even the ghosts and occult content, all of those comments full of spoilers by definition. I’m chomping at the bit to begin reading Running Grave, as you’d expect, but I promised myself I’d write up what I know about the King of All Gaffes Stories, the repeated unforced error by Rowling, Inc., in their early release of Strike7 chapters via Amazon and Apple.

How bad was it?

If Rowling’s legion of enemies had any internet savvy beyond posting poison on social media, they could have easily turned the publication of Running Grave into a nightmare train wreck. There are plenty of theories about why The Presence has gone all but silent on X/Twitter since 3 August; I think one of the best is that she doesn’t trust her team of advisers consequent to the Chapter Release Clown Show — or she wanted to lower her profile significantly lest she excite the Haters (and prompt the discovery of the open door to Running Grave).

Let me back up to describe what is known for sure about the Amazon and Apple pre-publication release of the first chapters of the new Strike novel.

On Wednesday 9 August, Amazon made the first 53 pages of Running Grave available via its ‘Look Inside’ feature. The Rowling Library, “since this [Look Inside] feature is not available on all countries and/or devices,” published the pages in the form of a PDF. In the next 36 hours, it was gone, ‘Look Inside’ was no longer operable, and The Rowling Library was told to disconnect the link to the PDF.

What happened? No one knew, or, if they knew, they weren’t sharing the knowledge. The HogwartsProfessor moderator channels was loaded with conjecture — my preferred theory was that the Hachette-Amazon feud had been re-Kindled and this was a ‘Gotcha’ moment in that conflict — but the only thing known for certain was that Strike fandom wouldn’t be told what was going on. I shared my copy of the TRL pdf with anyone who asked me for it and posted my first thoughts here on the preview chapters.

A reader named ‘PercyL’ wrote me a note on 7 September on the comment thread of that post that the six chapters released in August along with five more chapters had just been released on Apple. Nick Jeffery found a LibbyApp link to access this new text, I wrote about it briefly on the HogwartsProfessor weblog page, Elizabeth Baird Hardy wrote a longer piece, and I captured the pages via fifty screenshots in case this early release was also pulled back like a yo-yo.

Which turned out to be a prudent decision.

Bonni Crawford alerted me on 8 September, the very day after we learned of the Libby link to the Apple chapters, that access to the preview chapters was gone. This time, though, there was no mystery about what had happened — and what had caused the Amazon pull-back was revealed at the same time.

The ‘search’ capability of the LibbyApp text was ‘on’ and could not be turned off. To save the book, the whole page had to come down.

So what?

The search function on this page allowed the reader to enter any word or phrase in order to see its appearance, not in the open pages of the book, but on every page in the book. These were just single sentence snippets, certainly, so the book could not be read in its entirety — but by searching for character names, say, ‘Leda,’ ‘Robin,’ or ‘Cormoran,’ enough would be revealed to give up every secret in the book by anyone willing and smart enough to piece together what was revealed, especially the sentences from the end chapters. Searching for ‘the’ or ‘of’ or ‘and’? Pretty much every page.

We know this could be done on the LibbyApp page because it was done — and the spoilers spilled and spelled out on a Reddit page by ‘Pelican_Girl.’

What does this tell us about the Amazon preview chapters? You guessed it. The ‘Look Inside’ page on Amazon also has a search function — and the exact same exposure of the text is possible. It may take an hour or two, nothing to an online crusader or SJW, I’m sure, but everything of importance about the plot points in Running Grave were available to the determined Seeker.

There’s an old story, one I’ve heard and told myself so many times but can find no evidence of its veracity online. It takes place just before midnight on 15 July 2005, the evening before the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Hundreds of Harry Potter fans of all ages are lined up outside a discount store that will open its doors at 12:01 AM to sell the long-anticipated sixth book in the series. The excitement, something akin to anticipatory joy, fills the air, illumined only by street lamps high above the queue.

At 11:55 PM, though, a vintage Cadillac convertible drives very slowly by the front of the store and a Goth teen stands up in the rear seat to shout, “Snape Killed Dumbledore on the Astronomy Tower! Draco is the Dark Lord’s Servant! The Necklace Isn’t a Horcrux!” Screams fill the air before he finishes his litany of spoilers; fans fall to the sidewalk holding their ears wanting not to have heard the ending of the book. But there was no forgetting what they had learned.

How did it happen?

Half-Blood Prince went on sale eight hours earlier in the United Kingdom. There was plenty of time for someone to read the last chapters and relay them to friends on the West Coast of the US. Easy-peasy. Wicked, but not rocket science, right?

I repeat this story because those of us who left our browsers open on the Libby page continued to have access to it, I suppose through the RAM on the computer, even after the page was taken down. Elizabeth and I did one random search each to see if this function did what we feared it could do. My word was “Littlejohn” and every appearance of that name in Running Grave popped up (no, I didn’t read them all). Elizabeth used “Lucy” to check her suspicion about what happened in chapter 11 — and learned right away (no, she didn’t share it on the moderator channel).

Rowling, Inc., had left Running Grave open to the eyes of anyone wanting to learn and reveal the secrets of that book in a stunt akin to the Cadillac Prankster’s in LA circa 2005. Not once, but twice within the space of a single month — and with the exact same search function exposure in both instances. It boggles the mind.

In case you think there isn’t anyone that mean-spirited to use social media and ‘news’ outlets to wreck the best-laid marketing plans around this book’s release, not to mention the experience of readers around the world, think again. In addition to those who believe in the darkness of their heart of hysterical hearts that Rowling is “literally murdering” transgender people, there are people who have been served legal papers by Blair’s Barracuda Barristers (TM) over next-to-nothing just in the few days separating the Amazon and Apple preview chapters yo-yo “Now you see it, now you don’t” gaffes. Fresh wounds. Read their outrage about that legal over-kill here and the amplified story here.

I think it pretty easy to imagine this martyred maven thinking it a great idea to get inside Running Grave, learn all its secrets, and shout them from the world wide web house-tops. Easier, why not just take the revelations of ‘Pelican_Girl’ on Reddit if accessing the Libby page proved difficult or impossible?

For eighteen days, I have waited for this story to explode.

Rowling, though, for once, went quiet; a long cruise on her yacht in the Mediterranean and a longer vacation from X/Twitter with no posts of any weight or substance between 3 August and the publication day tweets this morning. I know we went quiet here, too, not because we were holding our breath, but just in something like wonder at the incompetence amounting to something like indifference among the Rowling, Inc., handlers, her publishers and editors.

That No Tweets siesta may have been because of family or business issues, of course, rather than a blackout to conceal her book’s exposure; 3 August after all was well before the first chapter release and recapture boomerang. Regardless of whether it was successful strategy or just the Ever Vigilant Eye of Sauron having blinked, Running Grave made it to publication day without a host of spoilers making the rounds in main stream and social media.

Our plans here at HogwartsProfessor are to read the book this week with reviews going up this weekend. I will be writing here about each Part as I finish it; I suspect everyone will have finished it long before I do. Here’s hoping, having had access to the book for almost three weeks without having succumbed to searching it, that I can read it all at last, one Part at a time, without being spoiled.

Which won’t be a tragedy if it does happen. I expect to read this novel nine or ten times in the course of charting it and exploring its mythological, structural, and allegorical heft, not to mention its place in the series thus far; the thrill of experiencing the ending for the first time is little compared to the revelations of repeated readings.

All of which I look forward to sharing with you! Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts, questions, and corrections in the comment boxes below and your discoveries over on the seven Placeholder Posts back on the weblog. Cheers!