How I Got Early Access To Pottermore.com

It’s the sixth day of the contest to get early access to Pottermore.com, J. K. Rowling’s exclusive, interactive Harry Potter e-bookstore, which launches to a general audience in October. I’m in (along with, by the end of the contest tomorrow, 999,999 others), and I didn’t have to stay up all night or buy an account on eBay. Here’s how it went.

The process is pretty easy. You visit Pottermore.com, solve the clue (today: “How many chapters are there in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Multiply this number by 14″) and append the clue answer to the end of the website address http://quill.pottermore.com/. That takes you to a Universal Orlando-sponsored page, and once you get through (or skip) the intro, you’ll see a map with a floating magical quill. Click it and the registration process is simple from there.

Since a lot of kids under 13 (yeah…it’s not just twenty-something reporters) are registering, you have to enter your age and, if you’re under 13, your parent or guardian’s e-mail address. Verification e-mails for kids’ accounts (those kids who don’t lie about their ages, anyway) are sent to their parents. Kids under 13 also do not see the option to opt into marketing e-mails from Pottermore or from the company’s partners, like Sony (NYSE: SNE). Judging by the comments on one of our earlier posts, a few parents have gotten pretty involved with this on behalf of their kids.

Just to be clear here, I can’t see anything on the site yet and was told I “may have to wait a few weeks” for my Welcome e-mail to arrive “as we can’t let everyone into the Beta site at the same time.” So I am not going to be sitting here reading early Harry Potter e-books for the rest of the day.

[slideshow]