The first edition of the Bosnian translation was first published in April 2011, appearing at the Sarajevo Book Fair. The audience for the Bosnian translations was already familiar with Harry Potter as the books had previously been published in Serbian and Croatian—mutually intelligible languages with Bosnian. The publisher, Buybook, was just starting to expand and decided that they should do a translation of Harry Potter. Because Bosnian readers were already familiar with the series in other languages initial sales of the books were slow, at one point they even discounted the books. There were 2,000 copies of the first printing in paperback, in 2020 after an agreement renewal Buybook produced another 1,000 copies for the second print run. The translations remain the same across both print runs although a few spelling errors were corrected.

The cover artwork for the Bosnian translation was done by Aleksandra Nina Knežević—she’s known for liking to play with composition, colours, strange perspectives and interesting character facial expressions. She was working as the principle designer for Buybook when they got the license to publish the Harry Potter book and was given the opportunity to illustrate them. There was some input from the publisher as to which motifs to use on the front and back cover but the designs were all original creations from Knežević using her imagination and creativity. She created a number of preliminary designs and on this occasion all of them were sent to the U.K. publisher Bloomsbury for approval and they selected the final cover artwork to be used for the book. The illustrations were initially created by hand and then follows a process of colouring and digital processing before the final artwork is created on computer.

The Bosnian book market has been impacted by the politics of the reason. Bosnia was once part of Yugoslavia when publishing houses in Bosnia & Herzegovina covered all six republics. After the last war the country was split in two (Federation and Republic of Srpska). The Republic of Srpska purchase books from Serbia and Bosnia are covering the Federation. The print runs for books are, therefore, always small in case they can’t sell them. Buybook also published The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling and she sent over signed bookplates for them. Buybook later used these bookplates and stuck them into Bosnian copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to help promote sales.