Toss half a million new books to your Witcher fans, o’ valley of plenty.
Orbit Books has announced it’s issuing a reprint of 500,000 books from Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy series to meet high demand following Henry Cavill’s debut as Geralt in Netflix’s The Witcher. According to a press release, the publisher said demand for the eight-book series started rising in the few months before The Witcher came out on December 20.
Since then, the company says book sales “have been phenomenal in all formats” and it’s having to do a major reprint to meet consumer demand. Half a million books, to be precise. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich wrote on Twitter that the news “could not make me happier.”
It’s not unusual for adaptations to inspire interest in their original series—Harry Potter was a major example of this. However, The Witcher has been on another level. Not only have Sapkowski’s books become a hot-ticket item—not bad for a decades-old series that mostly ran through the 1990s (with the exception of 2013’s Season of Storms)—but the video game franchise has seen a resurgence. Earlier this month, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt set a new record on Steam by having over 100,000 concurrent players (the game launched in 2014 and reached 92,000 players at the time). That’s an astonishing feat.
The first season of The Witcher is currently available on Netflix and it’s already been renewed for a second season, which is set to come out sometime in 2021.