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Published on July 18, 2007

Meanwhile, the 15-year-old company expects impressive sales growth once again in the second half of the year with the publication of the seventh in the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

Managing director Suvadee Jongsathitvatthana said cartoon books that educated children had become publishing's rising star.

The company started publishing illustrated books last October and has already published more than 100 titles. The cartoon-book category, one of seven, has generated the highest revenues for the company. It plans to publish an additional 30 titles during the second half of the year and 50 more next year.

Meanwhile, the category of science books for children contributes the second highest sales to Nanmee, while the children's-literature category comes in third.

Accumulated sales contributed by the three categories account for 70 per cent of total annual sales.

Children's literature has also been a rising star over the past six years since the first in the Harry Potter series was launched in 2000 - which was about the same time that Nanmee was looking for books to attract children and persuade them to spend more time reading.

Suvadee said the best-selling Harry Potter series had double its profit since 2000 to about Bt80 million and had resulted in an impressive performance by the company. At the same time, readers have witnessed an explosive amount of new children's literature introduced worldwide. Almost all publishers in Thailand now have a separate category for children's literature.

For the seventh Harry Potter book, Suvadee said Nanmee would print 200,000 copies of the Thai version, the same number as the previous books in the series. The Thai-language version will be open to reservations on July 27 and available for sale on December 7, while the English-language version will be ready for delivery to readers in Thailand on Saturday. About 10,000 readers have already reserved the English-language version.

To maintain the attraction of its children's-literature category, Nanmee Books has allocated a separate budget of Bt50 million to buy licences from both Thai and foreign authors.

At the same time, the company has allocated Bt10 million as an annual marketing budget to promote all of its books.

Suvadee predicts the Bt16-billion book market will grow 10 per cent this year. Nanmee, which currently has seven small publishers, has targeted sales growth of 20 per cent this year - excluding Harry Potter sales - from Bt300 million last year.

Nitida Asawanipont

The Nation