Breaking Dawn taking on the mega heavy weight Deathly Hallows. While they didn’t go head to head on release dates, they are vying for similar audiences and so will directly compete in rankings (or is it tankings) wars. The Twilight series, which includes the four books by American author Stephenie Meyer (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn) have had an enormous following but not nearly on the order of the Harry Potter world-wide craze. Deathly Hallows was merely the icing on the cake for what’s been a “real” fairy tale ride for Harry Potter.

While this article portrayed a battle, the truth is (as you know) there is no battle. However, the showing that Twilight has had in the box office is nothing to scoff at, but of course the sales and order from books have been the real money maker for them. So far Breaking Dawn, not New Moon, has been the heavy weight in the Twilight Book series, while Deathly Hallows has been the clear cut leader in Harry Potter book sales

While Harry Potter is now finished as a leader at the Box Office, Twilight still has Breaking Dawn Part 2 to go. If reviews of the latest movie are any indication, anticipation for part 2 will probably be pretty high.  It will be some time before we have a final tally for movie, book and DVD sales for both series, but it’s clear that even averaging the sales from both to compensate for the larger number of Harry Potter books, there will be no comparison and even only considering a pre order for the Harry Potter books it clearly smashed anything Twilight can hope to achieve.

In fairness to Twilight, the enormity of Harry Potter success may be attributed to the might of Warner Bros, while Twilight was under the control of Summit Entertainment. In summation, it’s fair to say though that followers of both have been happy with the final product and negative reviews have done nothing to sway loyalists. So if you haven’t already, place your Twilight or Harry Potter order and stay in the loop.

Deviant Art was established in 2000 as an online community showcasing various forms of user-made artwork. Deviant Art has become iconic and has a very loyal following for the niche. Artists from all over the world congregate at Deviant to share their art, styles and techniques used in the design of everything from wall art to photography.

Wall Art, with well known names like Fat Head leading the way, is a very popular expression of artistic form and is a natural extension of the types of people who like the Deviant Art niche. And while the name suggests otherwise, there’s nothing deviant about Deviant Art, other than they disagree with the norms and urge others to break out of the box and to express themselves uniquely.

Speaking of unique, is it just me or is there a lot of Grimm going on in the search engines now? There’s the Grimm television series which came out in 2011 in the U.S., Brothers Grimm of classical fairy tales fame, and the Grim from Harry Pottter. The Harry Potter version of the Grim is an omen of death (taking the shape of a large black dog), which is reputed to bring about the demise of the person who encounters it. The Brothers Grimm were German who around the turn of the 19^th century collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Finally, the new hit series Grimm, an NBC police drama which began in late October 2011, has been extensively searched for.

While there’s no direct connection between Deviant Art and Grimm, I found it noteworthy that both were trending in the searches. So my goal was to research them and try to determine if the spike was related to Harry Potter, the NBC television show, or the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales; it seems likely after digging into that the t.v. show fueled the search as people began searching for others uses of the word Grimm that they were familiar with.

After Google Books (eBooks) came out in a bid to steal away some of the thunder enjoyed by Amazon Books, there was a flurry of questions and debate about who would reign supreme in this evolving and cut-throat books market. And as we saw with the movie Deathly Hallows, which spurred even more interest in the book than the dvd, Amazon is in a unique position to satisfy ALL customers with their ebook, paper and electronic offerings; so in the case of Deathly Hallows a customer could get the Amazon Book, DVD/Movie and eBook all in one place at a competitive price.

Google decided to not try and enter the reader device market, which while dominated by Amazon’s Kindle readers is flush with other major players trying to make their splash. Instead Google opted for a software solution called eBooks that allows readers to use their PC?MAC or handheld device to read the Google books. Google’s online store is called the Google eBookstore, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be much headway in terms of Google Books stealing much of Amazon Books’s market share.

It seems that in the Amazon Books versus Google Books arena, Amazon is the clear heavy weight and Google might need to reconsider taking on such a formidable foe, and instead focus its financial leverage taking control of lesser markets or at least less well equipped opponents. While Amazon Books are the clear leader, there is no such leader in the DVD or movie industry. In the U.S. alone the initial print run for Deathly Hallows was 12 million copies; more than a million of those were pre-ordered through Amazon Books and Barnes & Noble. That is 500% higher than pre-order sales had been for Half-Blood Prince. On opening day, 8.3 million copies of Deathly Hallows were sold (more than 96 books per second!).

While its too early to tell how Deathly Hallows will do when movie sales and dvd rentals become available, but it stands to reason that the same kind of buying trends will happen… Deathly Hallows, being the final release, has everyone intrigued and on the edge of their seats. While Amazon Books and Google Books continue their face off (if you want to call it that), the movie and dvd industry has no such battle, nor any clear cut leaders.