Maas launch draws 1,500 events, ALLi points indies to fan community building
Of the 1,500 US and Canada events for A Court of Splintered Harmony, 150,000 tickets were sold, ALLi's Dan Holloway reported.
A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth book in Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series, launched this week with what Dan Holloway at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center called the biggest frenzy around a release since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in July 2007. According to the Bookseller, cited in the report, there were 300 midnight launch parties in the UK, 150 of them through Waterstones branches, plus 1,500 events in the US and Canada with 150,000 tickets sold.
The report noted there are no total figures available for the 2007 Deathly Hallows launch, but that large chains alone saw nearly 300 events in UK Waterstones stores and 1,200 in Borders stores at the time.
Here's the thing worth sitting with: nobody's handing indies a Bloomsbury marketing budget, but the infrastructure for community building that Holloway points to, bookseller partnerships, events, exclusive editions, is genuinely more open to indies now than it was a few years back. You don't need 300 midnight parties to use the same playbook on a smaller scale. Look at what Sanderson and Maas actually did with their fans, not just the numbers they pulled, and ask which piece of that you could run this quarter with one local bookseller or one online community.
From the Coral Wire edition of Mon, Nov 2 2026 · Coral Index 29/100 (Storm warning)