Big Green Bookshop gets business boost after Piers Morgan tweets

The Big Green Bookshop’s mission to tweet out every word of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury) to Piers Morgan has been continued by the Twitter community after the broadcaster blocked the bookshop from contacting him.

Last Sunday (12th February), Simon Key, co-owner of the Big Green Bookshop, began to tweet the whole book to Morgan, 140 characters a time, after the ITV presenter claimed he had never read the series written by author J K Rowling, which followed a spat he had with her on the social media site.

Key got to 865 tweets of the book before Morgan blocked him on Saturday afternoon (18th February). Since then, various members of the Twitter community have “taken up the mantle” and continued to tweet out the book.

Key told The Bookseller it was “lovely" that the mission was being continued by other people on Twitter. "It shows the power of love for J K Rowling," he said. "It’s very funny and I’m delighted it’s continuing."

He added that the endeavour has led to an increase in online orders and visits to the shop. “People were reminded that we exist", Key said. "We’ve had loads of people popping in and lots of online orders. Our Twitter following went up from around 12k to 23k. It’s been good."

Although the increased attention was good for the shop, Key said he had received some abuse from Morgan's followers. “Around 5.5m new people have heard about the Big Green Bookshop which is great. I received a lot of abuse; a lot of nasty emails, but it’s fine, it’s great. Piers clearly played along up to a point, but he blinked first so I won."

The tweets can be followed by searching “/32567” – the number of tweets Key said it would take to tweet the whole book – or the hashtag #HP4Piers.