EXCLUSIVE: Audible’s Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions have sold over 5M copies. Amazon-owned Audible started releasing new versions of the J.K. Rowling series last November, with a glitzy cast voicing the characters and cutting edge spatial audio.
All seven full-cast versions of the books have now been released and Audible told Deadline that it has surpassed the 5M sales figure. The news lands on September 1, which coincidentally is ‘Back To Hogwarts Day’, the fictional date that students return to lessons at the eponymous wizarding school.
The sale figure includes people who have purchased books individually, as well as Audible members who have used credits on them because the books are not part of the free catalog that comes with an Audible subscription.
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To put the sales number into context, another Audible bestseller is Project Hail Mary, which had a major Hollywood movie propelling sales and sold 3M copies in five years, whereas Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions have notched 5M in nine months.
Interest in all things Harry Potter remains high ahead of the launch of the HBO series. Previous sets of audio books, narrated by Jim Dale and Stephen Fry respectively, have proved incredibly popular. Audible, which co-produced the new audiobooks with Pottermore Publishing, said it hopes to top the 2BN listening hours that the Dale and Fry versions have racked up.
The cast of the full audio versions includes Cush Jumbo as the narrator, Hugh Laurie as Albus Dumbledore, Matthew Macfadyen as Lord Voldemort, Riz Ahmed as Professor Snape, Kit Harington as Professor Lockhart and Keira Knightley as Professor Umbridge.
Breakout stars Frankie Treadaway, Max Lester, and Arabella Stanton play Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger respectively in audiobooks one, two and three. Jaxon Knopf, Rhys Mulligan, and Nina Barker-Francis assume the roles of the trio (Harry, Ron, and Hermione respectively) beginning in audiobook four and carrying through to audiobook seven.
The latest seven-book editions total 130 hours in all and 200 actors played over 500 characters across the series.
