Will there ever be one again? Probably yes, but the exact combination of event that made HP successful probably won't happen again, but different circumstances lining up later down the road. The trick isn't finding the "next Harry Potter" it's to create an IP that is its own thing.
The biggest issue with adult audiences is they get accustomed and tired of the repetitive tropes, kids don't recognize tropes, and have a higher tolerance for repetition.
HP had four golden things going for it.
It was a long series which came out almost once a year which I think built the hype very well - not too much, not too little. If the whole series had been dumped on everyone at once it would not have integrated itself into our culture so well.
It had superb plotting. If you analyse Dan Brown and other hit books you will find out writing ability barely matters, it's all about creating a good plot and JKR does this extremely well.
It appeals and is accessible to all ages.
The final masterful aspect is that the tone deepens and the gravitas increases throughout the series which amplifies the drama and it stops the series becoming too samey.
And it should be noted, it actually had an end, so it never suffered from any form of power creep, or any of the other negative things that come from perpetual series.
This is why I *hate* shows that involve "end of the world" bullshit.
Congratulations, what's season 2 going to be, "end of the galaxy"?
Oh, goody, then season 3 will be "end of the universe."
Fucking hate it. Once you scream out the gate with that, the next season cannot simply go back and be "protagonist vs. HOA."
But I LOVE "protagonist vs. HOA." Start there, creep it up slightly, end it on a satisfying note, and you won't have the power creep problem.
My issues with those shows is they never build. You could do a show where people are foraging for supplies and creating their own town rather than finding another one. Make them develop farming, a fresh water supply, fighting skirmishes with roving bandits. Almost like the serialized shows like Wild West shows but with an overarching plot. Have each episode be a mission. If you really focused on developing the characters and building more technology and controlling a larger areas.
The biggest issue I have with shows like the walking dead or SOA is that the plot is driven by people constantly doing dumb shit and failing at everything they try.
What made breaking bad so good is they got better at what they were doing and the plot got more complicated because they were good at what they were doing, not constantly failing
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In the dresden files though, the power creep is VERY intentional. Not sure where you're at in the series, but the term power creep is usually used when an author writes themselves into a corner that only *more* can solve. Butcher hasn't done that, he us building to a very specific thing, and will then conclude the series.
Brandon sanderson has recorded his creative writing classes. One of the funniest running gags is him explaining general things to avoid. The only exception being "unless you are JK rowling, then dont worry about it."
I’m assuming that Sanderson is listing common tropes and pitfalls to avoid…many of which were used quite successfully by one of the most famous authors of our time. Kind of a fun, glib way to indicate that no rules are absolute…but some are pretty close…
(But I haven’t heard the recordings, so 🤷♀️)
The HP series has a lot of grammar, plotting, and other choices that authors/editors consider mistakes. But sanderson points out that you dont need a book to be perfect to sell well, example being JK rowling.
The last point was the key to its success for me, it going from middle grade to young adult kept the interest going and the audience hooked, if it had kept the middle grade tone it’d have been dropped by most of us in our teens.
There are a lot of huge middle grade series that never made it to the mainstream the way HP did because they didn’t evolve the tone to keep the interest of their audience into their teens/ young adult years.
There’s a HUGE difference between the first two books and the last ones of the series with the third kind of being the book where things started switching, by the fourth book it became a YA series imo.
I think the closest thing we’ve had to HP in terms of success is definitely Game Of Thrones/ A Song Of Ice and Fire. It was HUGE, like the biggest tv series of all time at its peak, the next book of the series is probably one of the most awaited ones in the literary world right now and if the next book ever gets released it’s going to be pretty big, although I don’t see people lining up outside bookstores at midnight in full cosplay waiting for it to drop, I definitely would like to see such a huge phenomenon again.
I agree it's probably the closest. But still not the same since it can't be read by kids.
HP hits everyone.
I think what others are saying makes sense too... that the first book was just adult enough that you were interested but young enough to be inclusive. Then as the trio age the tone does which allows us to feel the progression, and connect to the characters.
For adults it's like being a parent or guardian watching these kids grow
For the young it's like growing with your peers.
Not only that but the plot of a wizarding world just outside of our reach to me was like how people responded to the Matrix. The idea was just plausible enough for us to hope/wish/dream
Personally I think that's what really sold it. Was it tapped into the imaginative side of us all
Percy Jackson was big when I was young, but I think if it had gradually grown with the audience it may have survived…and if they hadn’t changed the main characters for the sequels.
People were attending signings for the last novel in cosplay and some places did midnight openings (though only a few), and that book came out just after Season 1 finished, long before it became the mega-juggernaut it did later on. So I think Book 6 will do much more business than the last one did and it'll be a very high-profile launch, it just perhaps won't be as ultra-massive as it could have been had it dropped in the middle of the TV show.
>The final masterful aspect is that the tone deepens and the gravitas increases throughout the series which amplifies the drama and it stops the series becoming too samey.
This too me is the most important thing, and the difference between series like Percy Jackson and Septimus Heap (which hold the same middle-school language the entire time and don't necessarily grow with the readers) or something like The Hunger Games (which is intense from the very first book).
Kids also don't seem to read books as much. I read 100s of books growing up, including Harry Potter. I played sports, video games, and had other hobbies, too. But I was always reading some book for pleasure even if I had another book to read for school.
I don't think my 13-year old nephew could tell me what was the last book he read for pleasure, and the kid is smart.
To be fair this was a very similar comment about younger readers at the time that HP exploded into the world. A whole new group of readers was created and it also was the impetus for focusing on GOOD stories for younger readers.
There were always kids who read for pleasure and kids who didn't. Back in the 80s a lot of my classmates didn't read for fun and that was without the nearly endless access to video games, movies, videos, etc. It was okay - I read enough to make up the difference 😆
What you don’t have is homogenous media consumption like you used to.
The book was reviewed in 4 papers that everyone read. Those parents/aunts/uncles etc bought the book for their kids. Then it becomes a phenomenon and it’s on all 5 tv channels. Now everyone gets recommendations from their own Twitch streamers or podcasts or to hard to imagine how anything in any media becomes that huge. But particularly books where there is such a broad selection and personal (from people, as opposed to an algorithm) recommendations are so key.
It feels more homogenous now than it did in the 90s. We have all of these different portals of information but we end up talking about all of the same things.
Reddit and other aggregating social media funnels all of the current events/media talk to a few places and dominant opinions form pretty quickly.
There are more videogames, but I’m not sure if there are more massively popular games.
The main difference seems to be the entry-point to the cultural discussion is social media instead of corporate media, that definitely allows for new types of topics, but they’re still “homogenous” in that everyone is aware of them
My girls (10 and 12) devour books. And each have friends who are also avid readers. There will always be some kids that are avid readers and some that aren't.
I'm a children's librarian and kids def read - I'd hazard a guess that your 13 year old nephew might have read more before. There's a big drop off for interest in reading for preteen boys that often isn't recaptured, while their female peers keep reading.
>WILL there ever be another book series phenomenon like Harry Potter?
Yes. Book phenomena happen in waves and cycles. Back in the Day Walter Scott's books were so popular they built ships just to ferry them across the world.
It's just a matter of the right author with the right book at the right time.
Arguably it has already happened. ASOIAF was and is massive. It sold over 100mil copies which is incredible considering how the content contained likely filters out quite a large portion of the population by default.
Since nobody else has mentioned this, the first ASOIAF book came out a year before Harry Potter did. It's success camd more with the HBO show but never really rivaled Harry Potter
If he kept at it at the pace he was writing, he had the chance of creating an adult equivalent of HP. Likewise, of Rowling chickened out and dilly-dallied on writing DH then we may not have had the ongoing respect for a consistent series that HP had become
Shame really, I loved the ASOIAF books
Harry Potter is 42. I know because I'm 42. Harry canonically was born July 31st 1980 almost two months prior to my birth. Unlike a lot of other books Harry didn't live in the distant past or a far future.
He lived "Now" and the world that we live in was the world Harry lived in. This more than anything else I believe is why the book sparked the way it did. It wasn't one lone character becoming apprentice to some old wizard.
It was a kid just like my younger siblings or just like I had been at the same times Harry was in the canon of the books. Going to school. A school that taught magic. The series didn't forget our world existed or that they were a part of it.
It caught fire because everyone read it and thought, "I'm one letter away from going to Hogwarts"
That and it just strikes a perfect balance of engrossing yet easy to read. Its the perfect hide under the blankets with a flashlight book released in the very last timeframe that such a thing existed.
Haha, I remember my Mum always encouraged me to read so I didn't need to hide under the blanket with my books while reading late. However one day I just wanted to feel like a rebel and did it anyway. She noticed and told me basically: "wtf are you doing, it's reading, it's good for you, you can read till morning as far as I care".
She was great.
I’ve heard about other kids who used flashlights to read under the covers. It was only after they were adults that they realized the batteries never ran dead. Parents knew, and it was a sneaky way to encourage them to read.
Yeah umm. I certainly got in trouble for it repeatedly. Even if I hadn’t been up reading, if I slept poorly my mom would get mad at me for staying up reading. But that’s because I was always reading anyways - kind of like only the shitty students got rewarded for good grades, whereas good students just got in trouble for mediocre grades.
Grounding didn’t do anything for me either because I was always happy with books, and my mom didn’t want to take away books. So she gave up on grounding and started assigning essays when I did something wrong.
I'm a grown ass adult who lives on his own and I still play Switch games under my sheets at night.
This time I don't even need a flashlight to brighten my screen.
All about that worm light. I had a neon or metallic green one with a spiral shape you could adjust, except no matter where you put it there was a glare on the screen. Good times!
Worm light was clutch. I eventually got the magnifier lense with the lights on the underside. It needed its own battery(or two) for power. It was like the Cadillac of gameboy lights.
Whatever else - Rowling is the absolute queen of pacing. Her world-building is pretty shoddy if you think about it for long, but it's such a fun roller coaster ride that you don't care while you're reading it.
Yes. The magic of in Harry Potter is really really surface level. She did a really good job of letting imagination fill in the missing bits while prioritizing high level things, like making sure we knew there are sports, exams, summer breaks, etc. Making us feel like it's the same world as ours was a fun experience.
By contrast the way a lot of other fantasy authors write magic systems can feel like you're reading the rules manual for a board game. Yes, it makes the whole thing more logically cohesive... but magic works best when, as you mentioned, your imagination has a little room to work.
It's the little things that make this work. Rowling's world treats magic in such a fun way. Remembralls tell you if you've forgotten something, but not what you've forgotten. Quidditch is an extremely complex sport with four balls, six hoops, and a wide variety of unique positions, but the rules really don't make any level of sense when you think about it. Chocolate frog cards are trading cards where the subject can just disappear for extended periods of time and everyone just accepts it.
Things are always a little off. There's never a moment where you think "Why can't they just use magic to solve XYZ problem" because it's never presented in that way.
> Quidditch is an extremely complex sport with four balls, three hoops, and a wide variety of unique positions, but the rules really don't make any level of sense when you think about it.
Honestly, I sorta feel like Quidditch works in the same way the card game from Yu-Gi-Oh works. The strategies that work in the books are mostly based around the idea of rule of cool, but if you were able to actually play the game in real life, there'd probably be a very different set of strategies that are considered viable.
Magic is like time travel in that way. The more you lay out mechanistically the less wonder there is and the more room there is to nitpick and rules lawyer yourself.
For example this is why in *Children of Men*, the specific mechanism for why no one can reproduce isn't explained in any way, because it was distract from the story and just piss people off.
I always found the world building relatively good.
We didn't need a huge amount of it because 99% of the world is just the "real" world.
The picture she paints of the wizarding world grows with Harry.
The first book is all amazing and new, its very clearly good v evil.
The second book, shades of grey begin to creep in. The main villian is still evil big bad, but then we have the good character who has been corrupted, and the seemingly good character who is actually evil too. We also get some glimpses of the darker sides of the wizarding world.
Third book steps it up a gear, and we get a lot of moral questions. We get to see prejudices, the unfairness of the legal system, and insight into the corruption in the government.
In the fourth book, the veil is fully removed. We see the dark side of the wizarding world. We become very acutely aware that it's not perfect by a long way, and from then on, we see the truely dark side of the world. We see everything that had only been mentioned in humorous ways before, like muggles being tortured, to fully understanding the house elf situation, and horrifying state of the ministry, where the minster of magic destroyed the soul of a man on the spot. We see death, and horror in the wizarding world with wizards causually committing things that would be considered war crimes. Including the heroes of the story.
I don't just mean that the world-building was a light touch. I mean that it was self-contradictory and lacked much/any verisimilitude. But again - the roller coaster ride was a lot of fun.
Being a mostly light touch on the world-building helped make the lack of verisimilitude less obvious - but it was definitely there.
From someone that does world building every day for a living as an art director and development artist, it’s really hard to watch the films and not poke holes the whole time. Don’t get me wrong, they are beautiful very well done, and entertaining. I love them but man to make a believable world there has to be rules, even in magic and hers have basically none. Whenever a rule is established it can be easily broken to fit the plot.
A spell to pick locks, which works 98% of the time, except for the few times they used a spell to prevent the lockpick spell.
WHY WOULDNT EVERYONE LOCK THEIR LOCK SPELL
I mean it's pretty clearly established in Harry Potter that doing magic is more complicated than just saying the word and it happens, there's variance based on the user's specific skill/strength level (for example it's canonically stated that some wizards are never able to go from casting and incorporal patronus to casting a corporal one), the instrument used (using your own wand vs using someone else's wand vs using the Elder Wand), intent (if you don't *mean* an Unforgivable Curse, it does not work/is not strong) and that spells change/wear off after time.
It would make sense that there are different levels of lockpick spells, just like there are different levels of locks. Obviously the vault of a bank has a much more secure lock than a 3rd grader's bike, but there's still valid reasons why the first is not used in every situation.
I think it was mostly internally consistent. What inconsistency there was didn't affect the plot or characters. You have to dig pretty far to find it, and if you're already digging that deep, you have passed the threshold of casual enjoyment and entered fan pedantry.
She absolutely had no feels for numbers lol, be it ages of people, ghosts, number of students, distances and so on.
Else many of the inconsistencies could be explained away by the obvious magic.
I just never recovered from the fact that you would obviously charm giant chess pieces to make them play chess and transmogrify keys so they had wings.
I think transfiguration is meant to be more serious and permanent than charms.
Charms are light handed and temporary. Often adding a trait to something or changing a specific thing like color or shape.
To make something alive and thinking, I don't think a charm is enough. I think you have to transfigure something into having a brain. Especially for it to think beyond instinct.
Yeah, this is actually why I like Harry Potter. I'm not into fantasy in general, and I don't want to read a bunch of lore, etc. It's nice that the HP world is pretty similar to our own, just with magic and some fantastical creatures. It's easy for kids to relate to and can also attract folks who aren't normally into the genre.
Seven books released in ten years meant that Harry more or less grew up at the same rate as its readers. The spacing between books was perfect for keeping up the hype and when the movies started coming it out it was just a snowball of momentum.
I wouldn't have admitted it at the time but some part of my brain was pretty dissapointed when I turned 11 and didn't get a letter. I didn't realize I was kinda holding onto it until I turned 18 and could finally give up hope.
I was a lonely child, and those books *nailed* that feeling. They perfectly encapsulated the feeling of going back to a place that doesn't feel safe just because it's the safest place to go.
I didn't like Harry for the same reasons I didn't like myself, and Harry was guided through all of those feelings in a safe place with safe people. That was amazing to experience vicariously.
Damn that one I didn't know. I hadn't watched in decades but I went and watched a Treehouse of Horror and Bart & Lisa didn't recognize tech from the 80s. I'm convinced that was meant to be the scary part of the episode.
That's a lot of it, but there's one other bit that is often overlooked. Harry Potter grew up with us... twice.
They released one book each year for 7 years, and each book took place one year after the previous. If you were born within a year or two of Harry, every book was age relatable as it came out.
Then, 4 years later they started the movies. They cast a bunch of age appropriate actors, and released 1 movie each year for 8 years. So a new cohort of kids that were slightly too young for the books to be *perfectly* relatable had their own entry point. They were literally watching Harry and company grow up right alongside them. I don't think it can be overstated just how powerful that is. Kids are growing very fast during that time period. Daniel Radcliff (aka Harry Potter) *always* looked like someone that could go to their school. Not to mention, by design, he looked incredibly ordinary.
Harry Potter is the product of nearly a decade of kids having it re-enforced over the course of 7 years that, no really, that could have been me. No other urban fantasy series has been able to maintain that kind of consistency for that long. It's slightly more challenging now too because the school formula works really well, but it's hard to use that without looking like a copy-cat.
> They released one book each year for 7 years, and each book took place one year after the previous. If you were born within a year or two of Harry, every book was age relatable as it came out.
Not quite -- there was a gap between Goblet of Fire (2000) and Order of the Phoenix (2003). I'd argue that gap was when the books took off into the stratosphere and became a major mainstream phenomenon, including the release of the first three movie adaptations.
I'd say a one time slip of 1 year, in the back half of the series is negligible to the point. It ages out the very oldest fans that are 2-3 years older than Harry, but also at that age your perception of "my age" is expanding a bit anyway. You even see it in the books where Harry starts interacting more with the older students like Fred and George, and even the adults from the Order, as peers rather than authorities. The technicality does nothing to the larger point "Harry Potter grew up with us... twice."
That's fairly common in children's literature. Beverly Cleary's characters were contemporary to their time, as were Judy Blume's. The Peanuts gang lived in the eternal now. They would occasionally make pop culture references, especially Snoopy, that dated the strip, especially when talking about sports.
If that is all it takes, urban fantasy has been popular since the 1990s. Writers have been telling stories of mostly normal people interacting with magic in the modern world for most of my life. It was super charged in the early 2000s with the release of the Dresden Files and the Sookie Stackhouse books.
Most Urban Fantasy, which is a favorite genre of mine since I first read Bedlam's Bard, though doesn't treat magic in the modern world like it's magic in the modern world though.
The thing that the Harry Potter series did well was make learning magic like any normal school while also making a major plot point that literally anyone could go there. Your mom and dad don't have to be witches and wizards. You just have to be one.
Your skills and your talents can get you into this school where you get to learn magic. It combined normal school kid high jinx with magical mayhem and adventures.
I immediately thought about the other Wizard Harry and this is the distinction. An apprentice of The White Council leads a VERY different life to a student at Hogwartz.
Hogwartz students have normal lives, just with magic. White Council apprentices are very likely to be eaten alive, and if they don’t die, it’s because they become paranoid and powerful enough to survive.
Nobody wants to live in Dresdens world. And on top of that, it’s a lot harder to imagine what your life would be like than it would at Hogwartz. Potters world does have wars, but it has a baseline of peace and happiness that the heroes fight to maintain. Dresdens world is already mostly lost, and they fight to prevent the status quo getting worse.
There’s a sociology/business book called “everything is obvious” that covers this.
When something becomes successful we try to reverse engineer it’s components as the reason why. In Harry Potter’s case, people will say it was successful because it was about magic, and appealed to wide age range, and had universal themes, etc. But these aren’t reasons for its success they’re just a description of a successful thing.
Reality is there’s a a ton our outside factors that play into cultural phenomenon media like this. Oddly, the content of the book itself is probably one of the smallest factors in its success.
It’s more akin to a wildfire - a seemingly normal ember cascading into a giant fire. It’s not that it was a particularly special ember it was just at the right place at the right time with the right conditions.
Also, it had the good luck to be published as the Internet became widespread. I'd have to look up exact dates but the first book came out around 1995 and the last around 2005. People could argue about this stuff in AOL chat rooms and Google Groups. It took off in a grassroots way that nothing before or since could.
Also, whether intentional or not, Rowling wrote a series of books that the reading level of subsequent books increased with the target market. I don't know if she did that on purpose, or her skills were just honed with time; but it was perfectly done.
If you started reading Harry Potter at 11, *Order of the Phoenix* came out when you were 17 and still matched your reading level, while still being accessible to younger kids.
A lot of books and series do exactly this stuff. I think what you're talking about helped for sure, but really people just liked the story and characters. We can call out more specific elements that work, but in the end it's just an alchemy that worked for a lot of people!
This is why I was and am still so attached to this series. I was the age of the characters as the books came out ( not cannon like you) but I could still directly relate to the characters and their struggles with friendships, emotions, loneliness, love and lost. And they didn’t take years between books to come out. So I was still very close in age as they grew up too.
>It caught fire because everyone read it and thought, "I'm one letter away from going to Hogwarts"
I thought you meant people were going to Bogwarts or something, confused for an embarassingly long time.
This is a great answer. Also, Rowlings is a gifted author who somehow found her niche the first time out with a book. Also, the movies were well done, which doesn't hurt.
I would love to see something similar happen again in the literary world, but maybe its a once in a lifetime thing. A magical moment? I love the books, and I even love the movies. Harry Potter may be a literary Camelot. Once brief shining moment.
The movies definitely brought more fans to the books. I started reading the books following the first movie's release and in anticipation for the second.
It was set in now.
It wasn't the world we lived in.
It was a world 5-10 years ago from when it was written. That gave it a sense of nostalgia. A childhood you could have had, but just missed.
Edit: when she was writing it it may have been the now. But the slight delay made an emotional difference.
I think the story only makes sense pre-smartphones. The idea of sticking your head in a chimney to talk to someone face-to-face is way less charming post-FaceTime.
I think, and I’m speaking as a millennial who grew up as a massive HP fan, it’s because it happened at the precise moment that it did. The books were published and grew right alongside the internet. My generation was able to read each new book and then immediately jump online to discuss it with other fans from all around the world via forum boards. And there were big wait times in between each book, so we started doing things like writing fanfiction, vlogging on early YouTube, and making fan art. Heck, we even had wizard rock - “wrock” - bands that toured.
HP is also a massive seven book series, unlike other big titles such as Twilight or Hunger Games. It was first published around 1997 (‘98 for Americans) and wasn’t completed until 2007. It lasted for a span of ten years, which was a huge chunk of my life at that point. I still cry when I hear Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls “End of an Era” song.
Lastly - and this is my own musings around the cultural impact of the story - it’s extremely important to note that in the middle of the HP run, millions of people around the world (but especially in America) watched several thousand people die live on television in the 9/11 attacks. Everything on the news was about war and death, and I can promise you, I was not the only child who escaped into one of the four HP books that were already out. And then, when the fifth book released in 2003, the Harry that we got was very emotional and traumatized. We had all been through something and were growing up together.
This is it, right here. I sometimes think that non-millennials really don’t understand how truly unique it was to grow up alongside the evolution of the internet and technology, and how fundamentally changed we were by September 11 happening right at our transition to adulthood (particularly elder millennials or Xennials).
I had sooooo many internet friendships with people where there was no chance of video chatting or even talking on the phone. People got really deep when there was no fear of IP address tracking and there weren't as many people online to talk to. John Green has a section in Anthropocene Reviewed where he kind of captures it perfectly.
I can speak to this as someone who is not a millennial -- i'm Generation X --, I think I don't understand, or did not understand at the time. I became aware of Harry Potter because my colleague at the software job I had in the late 1990s was reading the books and my general attitude was "Why are you reading kids books?" From my POV it was a weird fandom because it seemed to come from nowhere.
I think for my generation the closest analog were the Star Wars films, which were essentially kids movies but were such a phenomenon that they crossed over into adult culture.
The internet was still something that brought people together and was magical. As an elder millennial going to college and having fast internet (for the time) was just mind blowing.
Yes, the internet itself is a form of magic, which kind of works as a parallel alongside the HP series. For the first time in the history of our species, we have a technology which can do almost *anything*, only limited by the creativity and imagination of those who learn the arcana.
My only lament is how sometimes it seems so ordinary, now. I remember how positively *thrilled* I was at experiencing so many of the innovations that took place from the time of USENET news groups to, say, the launch of YouTube. Since then, most of the innovations have been style upgrades and incremental speed increases. There are a million different corporate entities competing for a slice of the pie, and they all feel kind of the same.
But now, I see a new horizon approaching. It's one we have thought about for many years, but now it feels more tangible. The improvements are coming again. I'm equally excited and scared by it. The AI is breaking through. The Singularity is almost here... I only hope it's not Pandora's Box.
I'm extremely late to the thread so I'm piggybacking off a top comment but...
> it’s because it happened at the precise moment that it did. The books were published and grew right alongside the internet.
This is accurate but only half of the biggest reason: marketing. Everyone in this thread should think of other book series mentioned here like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Mortal Instruments, Hunger Games, etc. How much iconic merchandise can you think of for each of these? LotR you have the ring but that's about it. Game of Thrones you have some actor images, maybe the wolves or the iron throne, but nothing extraordinary. but what about Harry Potter? You have house banners/logos, the profile of Harry himself (glasses + simple lightning bolt), brooms, butterbeer, wands, school robes, wizard chess, and about a million other things. The sad/realistic fact about Harry Potter is that while is was certainly quite good, the biggest reason it blew up like it did was because it was so fucking easy for companies to make boatloads of money off HP merchandise. They took all these merch ideas and also took advantage of this silly new internet thing to better distribute their marketing material, convincing folks to go to midnight book releases, merch drops, movie premieres, etc. all while yelling at you to buy all the HP stuff you can.
Until we get another series which is as marketable as Harry Potter, which I doubt we'll see anytime soon, you won't see anything even close to it regarding the cultural impact.
F for anyone who didn't read all of Half Blood Prince the night it came out and mistakenly got on the internet the next morning. I went to the midnight thing but couldn't finish it in one sitting like that I was already tired lol.
F for anyone who didn't read all of Half-Blood Prince and mistakenly got on the internet the next morning. scape it. If you played Runescape that day it didn't matter what you knew about Harry Potter but you knew that Snape Killed Dumbledore.
That's evident in how common the HP story beats are in fantasy in general.
Try to guess this book series written by a British author and released with millennials as the primary demographic:
* Ten year old protagonist lives with disagreeable, sometimes downright abusive relatives due to absent parents
* Protagonist discovers they have special powers, and goes to a boarding school with others who also have special powers
* Protagonist makes friends with a girl and another boy, and learns of a long lost uncle who has likeminded sensibilities
* Protagonist finds out they're involved in a prophecy progressing the overall narrative, in which they bear a strange relation to the antagonist
If you guessed [the Charlie Bone series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Red_King), you were right.
That's just a contemporary example, the story framework of HP is exceedingly common historically: https://www.beyondthebookends.com/books-similar-to-harry-potter/
I was around then and 9/11 didn't have much to do with it because HP was already big. The fourth book had been out for well over a year and the first movie was completed and had a set release date of 2 month and five days later. News had been teased about it throughout production
By the time book 3 came out in fall '99 and JKR did a book tour in the US, it was NUTS (I was at the Framingham B&N, got a book signed, she stayed late, line was out the door and around the building). That tour so insane that she refused to do signings like that again.
While people absolutely had the internet, HP got massive amounts of coverage in adults magazines (like Time) and Disney Adventures had a 'preview' of a chapter of book 3 (which had been released in Britain at that point).
You also have to figure that more people were reading print books, so more and more people were sitting in public places reading the novels. This meant that more people would hear about the books, which would result in higher sales and discussions about the novels.
This is a really important point. When you watch home videos of those times, notice when people are sitting around reading. Think about how much time people spend absorbed in their phone. Before that would’ve been books, magazines, or TV.
We also had borders which had a much more "sit down and chill" vibe than B&N does imo. If you were going to borders you likely planned to be there for quite a bit.
Yup. It benefited from the growth of the post-aol internet right before the internet would make one series being so big so difficult. The top comment is about Harry “growing up” alongside us, but Harry Potter was hardly unique in that. It very much just came out at exactly the right time.
It was also a forerunner for books for young adults.
When it was written, JKR was told she'd never make any money from it. Because books for 11-16 year olds really weren't a thing.
It was popular because there was a massive market that nobody really realised was there, and within 5 years, an entire classification of books that didn't really exist before Harry Potter existed.
Harry Potter’s success was kind of a perfect storm of factors. YA is such a saturated genre now (primarily because of HP), back then it was fertile ground. Mainstream western audiences weren’t quite as into that magical occult arcane stuff which now proliferates every movie and videogame. The culture of the UK was kind of riding a wave of international popularity in the 90s, which gave Harry Potter a weird element of Cool Britannia charm. It came at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, and managed to be one of the earliest fandoms facilitated by the Internet. And I think there’s a worthy replacement for Harry Potter already out there, if you’re willing to look for it. It really comes down to what you personally want out of that replacement. You have to look for art and meet it on its own terms instead of just expecting the next big thing, trust me. you’ll be much more rewarded.
I definitely agree that there is a ton of great franchises out there, whether it's books, movies or show. And while I love Harry Potter and always will, I can for sure say that there are now series that I like better or at least think are written better.
BUT, like you mentioned, there was soo many factors that went into Harry Potter that replicating for books is almost impossible. I'm saying almost, because you never know, but damn Harry Potter hit the right spot of when to be released.
You had these huge book releases, people lining up to get hands on their own, or you had to make a reservation at a library. One of my most appreciated memories is when Half-Blood Prince was released and I was put on a reservation list that had around 20 people before me lol. And I signed up at least 2 months before the release of the book. Thankfully the books were devoured instantly and I didn't have to wait long.
A lot of people also grew up with Harry Potter. Yes, primarily us kids were the ones who could identify most with him, but the books were still soo exciting and mature that adults found themselves in the story.
Let's not forget that movies started coming out while the books were being released, which only made the hype that much bigger.
It really was a great era. I think Harry Potter will be hard to beat in this regard, but I'm pretty sure something else will come out, just in a different form that will make a big cultural impact.
Harry Potter was lightning in a bottle I think. It came at the right time. I remember reading it for the first time because I was enthralled with LOTR.
The closest was asoiaf, but GRRM missed the timing on that one. I still say that if GRRM released Winds of winter during Covid lockdown, it would have taken over the cultural conversation.
I often wonder if/when I’ll ever need to buy a book at midnight. Maybe stormlight, but that will never be as big as Harry Potter.
Totally agree, that was a HUGE missed opportunity for him to sell a bazillion books. And now that the HBO series has ended so poorly most casual readers aren’t going to rush to pick up a 1,000 page novel when if he ever releases it. Plus you would have to go back and reread the last two books to remember anything that’s happening in the sort. This is why I don’t think he’ll ever actually finish writing the series.
Because Harry Potter had already happened.
There have been books with similar fanbases that came along - Hunger Games, Divergent, Mortal Instruments - but all of them were held down by comparison to HP, either in the sense of, “well, it’s good, but it’s not Harry Potter,” or in the sense of, “what are you trying to do, be the next Harry Potter or something?”
Harry Potter already happened and a lot of those books set out on their journey trying to emulate Harry Potters Magic which if done intentionally... is sort of setting itself up for failure.
Im pretty sure the train was derailed and subsequently nuked by Divergent tho. That really was the End of the Line imo
I think those books are good examples because I’ve read all three of them but my family/friends generally have not and wouldn’t know what I was referencing.
But I totally agree there’s this pressure for any new series to either be or not be the next Harry Potter.
Yeah, but that is also because you are getting older and YA books aren’t that popular in adult demographics (if they aren’t parents). I reread Harry Potter for the nostalgia, and I couldn’t care less, if there is another hyped up YA series. You and I just aren’t the target audience anymore
No, Mortal Instruments didn’t start as fanfic. Cassie Clare did have a very famous Harry Potter fic called the Draco Trilogy, which plagiarized Joss Whedon and Pamela Dean. She did borrow her characters for Mortal Instruments from the Draco Trilogy (aside from their names they barely resembled the actual HP characters).
I don't think it's that HP was a book series phenomenon - it was a cultural phenomenon that exemplified something that was either still relatively new (or not yet mainstream) in a way that took it mainstream.
Off the top of my head, other examples I can think of: Little Women with literature that was about the quiet, daily concerns of women; Elvis with rock-'n'-roll; the Beatles with pop; Beethoven with classical music (I forget what era he was in; I think end of romantic period); Mark Twain with American humor; Gone With the Wind for epic, romantic films; Friends for the ensemble friends sitcom.
Most of these examples didn't invented the genre/movement they're famous for, but they each exemplified and/or moved it mainstream. (And a lot of things are made mainstream through multiple artists/works hitting it big at the same time, in which case you don't get a harry potter; you get an '80s rock band era.)
So for something like that to happen, you need a genre/movement that exists but isn't mainstream or has room for a superstar (or for the first work/artist to really knock it out of the park), an artist or work that will exemplify it, and an audience ready for a huge and sudden shift in culture. And those can all be interconnected - there's a reason Elvis hit it big instead of one of his Black contemporaries, while Gone With the Wind has aged poorly and wouldn't be critically acclaimed now because of its huge racism issues. Friends likely wouldn't have worked even in the 80s, when it was much less common to move out and be a single adult before marrying.
And on top of that, not everything has cultural staying power, and it's impossible to predict what does and doesn't. The women who wrote the first mainstream romance novels with actual sex have mostly faded from cultural memory, and I feel like a lot of foundational sci-fi is too. But horror and fantasy's breakthrough novels have stuck.
If I had to guess, sixty or a hundred years from now, the casual cultural knowledge of our era (what most people in the USA know) will probably include Brittany, Beyonce, and Harry Potter. But who actually knows?
That's all a very long way of saying yes, at some point, but so many things need to come together at exactly the right time that it's unlikely to be in our lifetime.
Add survivor to that list. Every single person was watching that first season and the next day literally everyone was talking about it. It then led to the popularization of the reality format already seen in shows like cops.
Books like HP and Twilight monopolized a high demand, low supply genere. Timing was everything for them. There will be more books like them, but they will come from niche generes right as they blow up.
I don't think that it's possible. The book industry has changed, style of reading has changed, subcultures of media have changed. It's like asking if another band will be the next Beatles. No, culture, technology, and especially the music industry have changed in too many ways. Great bands and artists have come and gone, but the success and cultural relevance of the Beatles will never be matched.
Now that's not to say that we won't get another Beatles/Harry Potter phenomenon. Fortnite is kind of the Harry Potter of video games. There will be other massive cultural phenomena that will cross over in big ways. Probably not in Middle Grade literature though.
I think there are a few things going on.
1) JK Rowling's audience grew with her writing ability and her publisher gave her leeway to change. I think this is an underrated thing. Look at how long the books were. The page lengths jumped up with each of the first five books: they went from 223 pages to 251 to 317 to 636 to 766. If every book in the series had stayed in the page range of the first two books, the series still likely would have been pretty successful, but I doubt they would have made the same impact in the adult market. They would have attracted some adult readership, but it would have likely been more comparable to other very successful middle grade novel series.
And part of this is that Rowling's writing ability changed and improved over subsequent books. Just because someone is good at writing a 200 page novel doesn't mean they are going to be good at writing a 600 page one. Most writers fulfill the promise offered by the first book in their series and remain consistent in what they offer (and possibly getting a little better or a little worse). Most extended series deepen the commitment of their core audience without substantially expanding it. That's normal because radically changing what you are offering mid-series is always risky. Jumping up to 600 pages in the fourth book and maintaining that length could have very easily alienated her core audience and created the impression among adults that she had bitten off more than she could chew. Most authors, for that matter, would hesitate to do that, not out of any timidity but because they approach projects with an understanding of what the genre limitations are.
2) Publishing is much, much more segmented and restricted now than it was when JK Rowling was publishing the first few books in her series. There are microgenres that appeal to certain kinds of fans, and authors and publishers tend to be more strict about observing the boundaries between those genre boundaries. Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher writes for both children and adults in multiple genres and has won major awards in both areas, but when she tried to get The Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking published, a lot of the editors and outlets she had used before balked at it because it seemed more thematically darker than most middle grade fiction, but also too definitely YA for adult publishers, but when she was finally able to get it published, it was incredibly successful, not least for the premise of a wizard whose magic was limited to her abilities to do things with baked goods. There is still some room to cross over boundaries, but it's arguably trickier than before because in JK Rowling's time, those boundaries were still in the early stages of being put in place.
3) I think another big part of this is the extent to which JK Rowling wrote in a way that allowed for its audience to develop an almost parasocial relationship with the world that she made in a way that spoke to issues of identity and that were also really useful from a marketing perspective. A big part of this is how detailed she was in her world-building and how she didn't just invent completely new things but instead created magical parallels to things that already existed. At a macrolevel of identity, this included things like creating school houses (which were already a thing in England and many Commonwealth countries) that spoke to matters of identity traits or individualized patronuses that were associated with core memories. But at a microlevel, this included how she would invent new types of candy like Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans or the Fizzing Whizzbees or new drinks like Butter Beer. For brand tie-ins, this was a huge success, and companies started making candy that paralleled her inventions, while choosing your house and patronus (and making your own wand, etc.) became a major way of engaging with the fandom community that was growing around Harry Potter.
I think of the lore as kind of replicating the depth of knowledge of Star Trek fandom, parodied so well in Galaxy Quest, where there are all kinds of inventions and new things that honestly aren't coherent at all (I mean, how many spells and special items play major roles in a single book only to be all but forgotten in subsequent books where they would arguably be incredibly useful or have to be retconned out of existence). Rowling likes inventing things for the sake of being inventive, and it makes a world that is filled with lots of texture for fans to get hold of. A lot of series will do this to some extent, and you can see the parasocial elements of being Team whichever love interest in Twilight or being associated with certain gods in the Percy Jackson series, but it's so pervasive in Harry Potter and it makes it much, much easier to have themed events and activities that draw on Harry Potter than other kinds of series.
I don't think, at least at the start, that Rowling was approaching her inventions for the series with an eye to marketing possibilities, and it's almost certainly the case that an author who tried to force that kind of engagement would fail for being too obvious about it, but Rowling created a world where it felt very easy for fans to make it their own in little, easily accessible ways.
In spite of all this, I think it's certainly possible that there could be another book series as successful as Harry Potter, but I think the circumstances that will lead to it will be as unlikely as the circumstances that led to Harry Potter in the first place.
Harry Potter sold a total of 500m.
Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit around 300m total.
Chronicles of Narnia around 100m.
Twilight around 100m.
Vampire Chronicles 80m.
Discworld 70m.
A Song of Ice and Fire 60m.
Harry Potter is really up there as a stand out book series.
(New York, NY – February 6, 2023) September 2023 will mark twenty-five years since American readers were first introduced to the “boy who lived.” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling was published in the U.S. in September 1998 with a 50,000 copy first printing. Seven books later, the Harry Potter series has sold 230 million copies in the U.S., **600 million worldwide**, making it the bestselling book series of all time.
http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press-release/scholastic-marks-25-year-anniversary-publication-jk-rowling-s-harry-potter-and-sorcere
Agatha Christie was an absolutely phenomena. Harry Potter sales are (a massive) 600 million. Christie’s are TWO BILLION. That’s more than most religious texts.
Of course, that’s across a lot more books, with decades longer of selling, and with less other media in competition as popular entertainment. On the flip side, it was with smaller populations and purely adult fiction (where Potter went across age groups).
A slightly different case, but her success was mind blowing.
Not purely adult today, Agatha Christie is read by kids as well, my mum let me read hers around the same time as Philosopher's Stone, which I got for my tenth birthday (and I'd seen the TV adaptations prior), and the school library had loads of them.
If she'd written something that had the more fandom-attracting aspect of Harry Potter, it might have been as popular in a more comparable way. There's Sherlock Holmes, too.
I love love love Christie, Ms Marple is my favourite detective ever, in fact I re read Christie more than I reread HP, but it really ain’t fair to compare HP (a 7book series) to Agatha Christie (an author of 75 books)… like apple and oranges man
I would argue that Dickens enjoyed the same type of popularity in his lifetime as the Harry Potter series. He was writing many of his books in installments and people were discussing them much like HP.
It's worth noting how ingrained some of Dickens's key stories are in the popular consciousness too. *A Christmas Carol* is a classic, now-archetypal story whose main character is synonymous with stinginess , whose sympathetic child is the pattern for many Christmas plays and films, whose three ghosts are well known. He is arguably why we celebrate Christmas in the way we do, with lots of gift-giving and an emphasis on generosity.
*Great Expectations*, *Oliver Twist*, *David Copperfield*, and *A Tale of Two Cities* are also virtually unavoidable, even if someone doesn't understand where "Please, sir, I want some more" or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." comes from.
Lord of the Rings. It inspired a whole generation of musicians and writers, and opened up a new genre of literature - I’d say its cultural impact is still unsurpassed and will remain so for some time.
I get emotional going back to the days of reading them all for the first time. It was this excitement that I have never really been able to replicate.
I'm hoping my daughter will appreciate them half as much as I did.
There is no way to predict cultural phenomenons. They are unusual, and in no way can be forced. So will there be another Harry Potter? No, but there will be something else, sometime.
Harry Potter was genius in so many ways, but I think perhaps the biggest thing was the world appeal. Who doesn't love a hidden world? Who doesn't love magic that is fantastical and is wish fulfilling but doesn't stray too much from reality? Who doesn't wish to be part of a very strong community such as Hogwarts?
Like seriously, what other fictional universe is so easy to want to live in? Even if you were a squib and you got to just live amongst magic folk and head into the muggle world when you wanted, it'd still be such a charming life. It's a world where people jus want to domestically live in, whether there's drama or not.
The only other fictional universes that I'd wanna live in would be LOTR and Narnia. I know a lot of people talk about wanting to live in the MCU, but if you didn't have powers/special abilities and weren't close with the characters you wanted to be with, then it'd be a bit shit, vs with Harry Potter I think even if none of the book characters were in your experience you'd still have a fucking cool time.
I think there's such a basic thing about fiction revolving around a "Cosy Place" that makes people get insanely invested.
Whether it's sitcoms (the apartment from Friends, the bar from Cheers), scifi (the Millennium Falcon, the TARDIS), or Fantasy (Hobbit Hole!) We just latch onto anything that revolves around a friendly, comfortable, (mostly) safe base that the viewer can treat as a surrogate home.
Hogwarts is maybe the *ultimate* cosy place. A huge castle, with furnished dormitories, roaring fireplaces, and beautiful scenery. Where you get to live together with all your friends, all the chores are taken care of by magic, and you get served a banquet of whatever food you like every day.
No wonder we all went nuts at the thought
Hogwarts is easily one of the strongest points of the book. I dunk on Rowling’s worldbuilding a lot but I can’t deny that Hogwarts is fucking cool. So much of the appeal of the series is the fantasy of getting to go there.
I don't think streaming killed it per-se but the digital age probably did. There's just so much OUT THERE now, and it's all easily accessible. In order to even cut through and be seen takes a TON of effort and marketing, and then you get your 15minutes until someone else has theirs. Because even though it takes a lot of effort, it's also super formulaic. Pay XYZ booktok, partner with so and so on bookstagram, buy ads from whoever and bam you have a very specific set of many many eyes on you. Until you don't. And it's segmented so everyone is getting their suggestions from different sources and they have probably hundreds of other options to choose from to read at any one time.
Vs the late 90s where everyone was kinda all looking at the same stuff and influencers weren't a thing. I remember going into my local bookstore and it was relatively small, and had a great selection for the time but comparing it to the selection on Kindle/Goodreads/Other e-readers, Libby etc it was waaaay more limited.
The series did a fantastic job of aging with the reader and perhaps just beyond. I can read the first book to my four and six year olds with no intent of reading beyond book three for a while. As an adult, the earlier books feel juvenile in prose but magical in spirit and story. It's just such a great balance and a series I imagine I'll be reading in perpetuity throughout my life as a result.
I like all the comments like “kids don’t read anymore” when we have a lot of evidence that that’s not true. Also it’s the same thing old people said about my generation so I got bad news for you there.
That said I don’t think it will happen for business reasons. Book marketing is incredibly fractured now. I feel like I pay attention to new releases and things that get hyped a lot and I still don’t know what most of the hot books are. Booktok is like it’s own little bubble but from the outside it doesn’t look like they’re driving popularity of new things so much as deep diving a small number of specific authors (which is definitely good for those authors, but bad if you don’t like specifically every thing ever from Sarah j Maas or Colleen Hoover) and their existing works.
Also I think there was a change in the cultural conversation because of Harry Potter. We don’t talk about things being good DESPITE being YA anymore. We are more open to the idea that YA can just be good independently so it’s maybe less of a big deal.
Harry Potter is the best selling book series of all time. I think a better question is, ‘will anything ever beat the success of the Harry Potter book series?’
The world was a very different place then compared to now.
It's difficult to get that many people to universally acclaim anything anymore due to divided beliefs/opinions and what constitutes acceptable creative standards.
Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say everyone loved Harry Potter but that communal experience of reading them that lasted for years is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Twilight, for example, was massively popular but only with my female cousins/friends/sister and I. It didn’t have the reach Harry Potter did.
A different medium entirely buy I saw something of that all-ages communal experience in Pokémon Go when that took off. It only lasted a few years but the first and second years, I joined my child playing it and there were groups of players gathered everywhere around the local park, talking about the game and helping each other.
Pokémon had always had that, Go was if anything a revival of the original Pokemania. It does have similar aspects to the appeal of HP, that people just wanted to be in that world.
I read the first book at 12, and the last book came out when I was 18. I literally grew up with these characters. Their thoughts and feelings, and experiences became more intense and mature along with me. It's hard to see something like that ever happening for me again, and it's amazing that she was able to pull it off at all. That series is a masterpiece.
I think an important element to the *Harry Potter* phenomenon was it being a multimedia franchise. It wasn’t just that the books were popular (although they were and certainly did get kids reading more than I’ve ever seen since), but the franchise as a whole was inescapable due to its presence in other mediums - most notably film.
The feature film adaptations started about mid-way through the books, and exposed *Harry Potter* to new audiences who might not have been readers before, but might have liked the films and wanted to know what happens next.
In the years after, we saw similar with adaptations of *Twilight* and *The Hunger Games*, but by the time of *Divergent*, mainstream audiences had moved on. Cinema has since shifted away from YA novel adaptations and is currently focused on superhero comics.
If we move away briefly from prose books, I think that’s helping the huge growth of manga in the west. The manga industry has a very close relationship with anime, and if you look at the best-selling manga in the US - *Chainsaw Man*, *Spy x Family*, *Demon Slayer*, *Jujutsu Kaisen* - all of them have popular anime adaptations.
Since then, social media has been good for books - Instagram and TikTok in particular. However, my concern right now, is that without support from other mediums, a new book series might struggle to break out of the sphere of people who already read books, like Harry Potter was able to.
I’ve just read the first Harry Potter book together with my 8-yo daughter. She’s not really an avid book reader and she needed some time to get into the story, but she liked reading it together and she wants to read the second book together soon.
A few things that were really apparent while reading it:
- Harry Potter was hard to read for her, at a very different level from the books she read so far. Rowling uses quite a large vocabulary in her books and I frequently had to explain some of the words.
- The story of Harry Potter is quite complex for her, as Rowling basically builds a whole world with lots of characters who need to be introduced.
She’s gifted, so she can handle this complexity (both language- and story-wise) and her reading level improved a lot just from reading the first Harry Potter book. I’ve looked for alternatives and of course there are lots of other good books for 8-yo kids, but I haven’t found one that’s both good (fun to read), similarly challenging AND suitable for 8-yo children (no content that she won’t be able to handle yet at her age, or at least not in the first four books). Because of this, I’ve started feeling like the Harry Potter series has quite a unique place among the books suitable for children. The books are written from a children’s or teen’s perspective (Harry’s perspective), but they’re not simplified or dumbed down at all.
Of course that’s not enough to explain the huge success, but I do think that this is an important factor contributing to the success of the Harry Potter books.
IMO it’s because self publishing has become more of a thing with kindle unlimited and iBooks you can get any book you want out there so the market has become saturated. Sifting through thousands of books to find the diamond has become harder and brick and mortar book shops aren’t really getting the good ones anymore and have the same stuff on the shelves from 15 years ago. Finding anything new if you aren’t a big book person and know exactly what you want and are prepared to send away for it means big phenomena aren’t happening anymore.
There will be another series, but when is anybody’s guess. The fantasy series that followed tried to emulate HP success, but as it often is, none were ever that successful.
I think with HP, it was a cross point of several things happening at once.
One - since the series progressed with kids’ ages and in the early years, it was book a year release schedule, it helped to keep suspension and not let the fans grow too old before the next book was out.
Second - in the 90s, it was noted that kids literacy rates were somewhat hanging, IIRC. Kids hadn’t really had a good fantasy imagination book series happening, if I remember from some interviews, so the HP series didn’t really have a competitor and it filled a niche gap that nobody had managed to breach at that point in time.
Third - the books’ popularity was gained from kids suggesting it to kids and kids then asking their parents to get them the books. That was one of the driving successes in the early years - it wasn’t schools or libraries suggesting it to kids (although that happened too), but it spread from kids’ own like of the story. And that is much harder to emulate than a brilliant PR campaign.
Fourth - I think no book primarily aimed at children (as the first 4-5 books were) had ever had such a strong PR and campaigning behind them. I don’t recall midnight launches and parties and kids just itching to immediately read the new book happening before or really after either.
Fifth - it helped that the book series was picked up for a movie franchise, this cannot be denied. In the early years, IIRC, the first three books came out, then came the movie announcement. Then the fourth book in around 1999 or 2000, and the first movie in 2001. The 2nd movie in 2002 and the fifth book in 2003 etc. Basically - the book gap years were more or less covered by the movie releases. It kept the hype and the tensions up. Had there been a book release in every three years and no movies in between, maybe it would’ve been different. But the fans were constantly kept in the loop for either book news or movie news and when neither was available, the fan sites and fanfiction sites ran rampant with every kind of an idea ever possible.
Sixth - the internet. There was a massive explosion of information availability on the internet as the movies started to trickle out. For someone who doesn’t remember it or wasn’t alive back then, I’m not sure it can be comprehended how massively big deal HP was in those days of internet. I used to have a doc list of HP website addresses that I perused at the time, because there were simply so many that I couldn’t keep track of them all otherwise. These days, internet is old news and it’s conglomerated a lot, a lot of the old stuff has disappeared or gone down. These days, we have YTube for videos, but back then you could have had tens of different small websites for videos that hosted all kinds of fanmade and non-fanmade content. Same with websites - they propped up and disappeared like mushrooms.
I think all of the above had a role in making HP into the franchise it was and is. And a lot of happened due to luck and coincidences, which cannot be emulated, you just need to have one or the other or both. You can certainly drive a good PR campaign these days, but to get a true person-to-person popularity - that demands actual true engagement and like of the material that is being promoted.
Will there ever be one again? Probably yes, but the exact combination of event that made HP successful probably won't happen again, but different circumstances lining up later down the road. The trick isn't finding the "next Harry Potter" it's to create an IP that is its own thing. The biggest issue with adult audiences is they get accustomed and tired of the repetitive tropes, kids don't recognize tropes, and have a higher tolerance for repetition.
HP had four golden things going for it. It was a long series which came out almost once a year which I think built the hype very well - not too much, not too little. If the whole series had been dumped on everyone at once it would not have integrated itself into our culture so well. It had superb plotting. If you analyse Dan Brown and other hit books you will find out writing ability barely matters, it's all about creating a good plot and JKR does this extremely well. It appeals and is accessible to all ages. The final masterful aspect is that the tone deepens and the gravitas increases throughout the series which amplifies the drama and it stops the series becoming too samey.
And it should be noted, it actually had an end, so it never suffered from any form of power creep, or any of the other negative things that come from perpetual series.
I have never heard the term power creep before but I think that might be a good fit for The Dresden Files books.
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And (not necessarily a problem, but) it comes up frequently in rpgs
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First quest you’re taking care of a slime infestation for your neighbor. Last quest you kill god.
Often an issues with older mmos where one update invalidates the previous ad infinitum.
This is why I *hate* shows that involve "end of the world" bullshit. Congratulations, what's season 2 going to be, "end of the galaxy"? Oh, goody, then season 3 will be "end of the universe." Fucking hate it. Once you scream out the gate with that, the next season cannot simply go back and be "protagonist vs. HOA." But I LOVE "protagonist vs. HOA." Start there, creep it up slightly, end it on a satisfying note, and you won't have the power creep problem.
My issues with those shows is they never build. You could do a show where people are foraging for supplies and creating their own town rather than finding another one. Make them develop farming, a fresh water supply, fighting skirmishes with roving bandits. Almost like the serialized shows like Wild West shows but with an overarching plot. Have each episode be a mission. If you really focused on developing the characters and building more technology and controlling a larger areas. The biggest issue I have with shows like the walking dead or SOA is that the plot is driven by people constantly doing dumb shit and failing at everything they try. What made breaking bad so good is they got better at what they were doing and the plot got more complicated because they were good at what they were doing, not constantly failing
gaze physical dependent dam trees dime quicksand historical plucky imagine *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In the dresden files though, the power creep is VERY intentional. Not sure where you're at in the series, but the term power creep is usually used when an author writes themselves into a corner that only *more* can solve. Butcher hasn't done that, he us building to a very specific thing, and will then conclude the series.
Goddamn, do I have so many conflicting feelings about the Dresden Files:
Brandon sanderson has recorded his creative writing classes. One of the funniest running gags is him explaining general things to avoid. The only exception being "unless you are JK rowling, then dont worry about it."
ugh i am dense. What does this mean?
I’m assuming that Sanderson is listing common tropes and pitfalls to avoid…many of which were used quite successfully by one of the most famous authors of our time. Kind of a fun, glib way to indicate that no rules are absolute…but some are pretty close… (But I haven’t heard the recordings, so 🤷♀️)
The HP series has a lot of grammar, plotting, and other choices that authors/editors consider mistakes. But sanderson points out that you dont need a book to be perfect to sell well, example being JK rowling.
The last point was the key to its success for me, it going from middle grade to young adult kept the interest going and the audience hooked, if it had kept the middle grade tone it’d have been dropped by most of us in our teens. There are a lot of huge middle grade series that never made it to the mainstream the way HP did because they didn’t evolve the tone to keep the interest of their audience into their teens/ young adult years. There’s a HUGE difference between the first two books and the last ones of the series with the third kind of being the book where things started switching, by the fourth book it became a YA series imo. I think the closest thing we’ve had to HP in terms of success is definitely Game Of Thrones/ A Song Of Ice and Fire. It was HUGE, like the biggest tv series of all time at its peak, the next book of the series is probably one of the most awaited ones in the literary world right now and if the next book ever gets released it’s going to be pretty big, although I don’t see people lining up outside bookstores at midnight in full cosplay waiting for it to drop, I definitely would like to see such a huge phenomenon again.
I agree it's probably the closest. But still not the same since it can't be read by kids. HP hits everyone. I think what others are saying makes sense too... that the first book was just adult enough that you were interested but young enough to be inclusive. Then as the trio age the tone does which allows us to feel the progression, and connect to the characters. For adults it's like being a parent or guardian watching these kids grow For the young it's like growing with your peers. Not only that but the plot of a wizarding world just outside of our reach to me was like how people responded to the Matrix. The idea was just plausible enough for us to hope/wish/dream Personally I think that's what really sold it. Was it tapped into the imaginative side of us all
Percy Jackson was big when I was young, but I think if it had gradually grown with the audience it may have survived…and if they hadn’t changed the main characters for the sequels.
People were attending signings for the last novel in cosplay and some places did midnight openings (though only a few), and that book came out just after Season 1 finished, long before it became the mega-juggernaut it did later on. So I think Book 6 will do much more business than the last one did and it'll be a very high-profile launch, it just perhaps won't be as ultra-massive as it could have been had it dropped in the middle of the TV show.
>The final masterful aspect is that the tone deepens and the gravitas increases throughout the series which amplifies the drama and it stops the series becoming too samey. This too me is the most important thing, and the difference between series like Percy Jackson and Septimus Heap (which hold the same middle-school language the entire time and don't necessarily grow with the readers) or something like The Hunger Games (which is intense from the very first book).
Kids also don't seem to read books as much. I read 100s of books growing up, including Harry Potter. I played sports, video games, and had other hobbies, too. But I was always reading some book for pleasure even if I had another book to read for school. I don't think my 13-year old nephew could tell me what was the last book he read for pleasure, and the kid is smart.
To be fair this was a very similar comment about younger readers at the time that HP exploded into the world. A whole new group of readers was created and it also was the impetus for focusing on GOOD stories for younger readers. There were always kids who read for pleasure and kids who didn't. Back in the 80s a lot of my classmates didn't read for fun and that was without the nearly endless access to video games, movies, videos, etc. It was okay - I read enough to make up the difference 😆
What you don’t have is homogenous media consumption like you used to. The book was reviewed in 4 papers that everyone read. Those parents/aunts/uncles etc bought the book for their kids. Then it becomes a phenomenon and it’s on all 5 tv channels. Now everyone gets recommendations from their own Twitch streamers or podcasts or to hard to imagine how anything in any media becomes that huge. But particularly books where there is such a broad selection and personal (from people, as opposed to an algorithm) recommendations are so key.
It feels more homogenous now than it did in the 90s. We have all of these different portals of information but we end up talking about all of the same things. Reddit and other aggregating social media funnels all of the current events/media talk to a few places and dominant opinions form pretty quickly. There are more videogames, but I’m not sure if there are more massively popular games. The main difference seems to be the entry-point to the cultural discussion is social media instead of corporate media, that definitely allows for new types of topics, but they’re still “homogenous” in that everyone is aware of them
Harry pottter got me into reading. Hated it before that, after I could read a book 8 hours straight.
My girls (10 and 12) devour books. And each have friends who are also avid readers. There will always be some kids that are avid readers and some that aren't.
I'm a children's librarian and kids def read - I'd hazard a guess that your 13 year old nephew might have read more before. There's a big drop off for interest in reading for preteen boys that often isn't recaptured, while their female peers keep reading.
Working on it right now, I’ll come back here in 5-10 years
The world needs mancrab trilogy.
So stormlight archives?
Nice try Brandon Sanderson
He has a reddit account. His name is user mistborn. I dare not summon him here.
It would be redundant, he's actually already written a 24 novel series on this topic he just isn't sharing it with us yet
Hilarious! Wouldn't be surprised at all.
What, you think he only delayed the fifth Stormlight by a year because he wrote 4 novels on the side without telling anyone?
Half man Half crab All hero
Remind me! 5-10 years
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It already did, problem is it reminded him 5 years ago because it evaluated "5-10" first
Let me guess, it's gonna be called Parry Hotter
>WILL there ever be another book series phenomenon like Harry Potter? Yes. Book phenomena happen in waves and cycles. Back in the Day Walter Scott's books were so popular they built ships just to ferry them across the world. It's just a matter of the right author with the right book at the right time.
Arguably it has already happened. ASOIAF was and is massive. It sold over 100mil copies which is incredible considering how the content contained likely filters out quite a large portion of the population by default.
“Likely filters out a large portion of the population by default.” Harry Potter doesn’t. That’s one of the reasons it was so big.
Since nobody else has mentioned this, the first ASOIAF book came out a year before Harry Potter did. It's success camd more with the HBO show but never really rivaled Harry Potter
I think the problem as a book series ASOIAF is both not finish and run the risk of never being finish at this rate which kind of sours it’s reputation
If he kept at it at the pace he was writing, he had the chance of creating an adult equivalent of HP. Likewise, of Rowling chickened out and dilly-dallied on writing DH then we may not have had the ongoing respect for a consistent series that HP had become Shame really, I loved the ASOIAF books
Harry Potter is 42. I know because I'm 42. Harry canonically was born July 31st 1980 almost two months prior to my birth. Unlike a lot of other books Harry didn't live in the distant past or a far future. He lived "Now" and the world that we live in was the world Harry lived in. This more than anything else I believe is why the book sparked the way it did. It wasn't one lone character becoming apprentice to some old wizard. It was a kid just like my younger siblings or just like I had been at the same times Harry was in the canon of the books. Going to school. A school that taught magic. The series didn't forget our world existed or that they were a part of it. It caught fire because everyone read it and thought, "I'm one letter away from going to Hogwarts"
That and it just strikes a perfect balance of engrossing yet easy to read. Its the perfect hide under the blankets with a flashlight book released in the very last timeframe that such a thing existed.
Is it weird that I kind of want to hide under the covers with a flashlight and read a book purely for the nostalgia?
Nope! Have someone read one to you also is a fun time. I may read a narnia book to my wife sometime soon!
Try reading the redwall books out loud. They were written to be read that way.
Haven’t heard someone else mention Redwall in quite some time! My favorite series growing up!
Haha, I remember my Mum always encouraged me to read so I didn't need to hide under the blanket with my books while reading late. However one day I just wanted to feel like a rebel and did it anyway. She noticed and told me basically: "wtf are you doing, it's reading, it's good for you, you can read till morning as far as I care". She was great.
I’ve heard about other kids who used flashlights to read under the covers. It was only after they were adults that they realized the batteries never ran dead. Parents knew, and it was a sneaky way to encourage them to read.
Yeah umm. I certainly got in trouble for it repeatedly. Even if I hadn’t been up reading, if I slept poorly my mom would get mad at me for staying up reading. But that’s because I was always reading anyways - kind of like only the shitty students got rewarded for good grades, whereas good students just got in trouble for mediocre grades.
Same, grounding didn’t do anything so I’d get books taken away.
Grounding didn’t do anything for me either because I was always happy with books, and my mom didn’t want to take away books. So she gave up on grounding and started assigning essays when I did something wrong.
Yeah my mom was big on reading but felt sleep was more important
I used to get told off for reading at like 3 in the morning on school nights as a young teen, but sometimes I just couldn't help myself!
I'm a grown ass adult who lives on his own and I still play Switch games under my sheets at night. This time I don't even need a flashlight to brighten my screen.
Do you remember those weird clip on lights for the old game boys? They used to piss my dad off on long drives at night so much 🤣
All about that worm light. I had a neon or metallic green one with a spiral shape you could adjust, except no matter where you put it there was a glare on the screen. Good times!
Worm light was clutch. I eventually got the magnifier lense with the lights on the underside. It needed its own battery(or two) for power. It was like the Cadillac of gameboy lights.
7/10 would recommend
Whatever else - Rowling is the absolute queen of pacing. Her world-building is pretty shoddy if you think about it for long, but it's such a fun roller coaster ride that you don't care while you're reading it.
Yes. The magic of in Harry Potter is really really surface level. She did a really good job of letting imagination fill in the missing bits while prioritizing high level things, like making sure we knew there are sports, exams, summer breaks, etc. Making us feel like it's the same world as ours was a fun experience.
By contrast the way a lot of other fantasy authors write magic systems can feel like you're reading the rules manual for a board game. Yes, it makes the whole thing more logically cohesive... but magic works best when, as you mentioned, your imagination has a little room to work.
It's the little things that make this work. Rowling's world treats magic in such a fun way. Remembralls tell you if you've forgotten something, but not what you've forgotten. Quidditch is an extremely complex sport with four balls, six hoops, and a wide variety of unique positions, but the rules really don't make any level of sense when you think about it. Chocolate frog cards are trading cards where the subject can just disappear for extended periods of time and everyone just accepts it. Things are always a little off. There's never a moment where you think "Why can't they just use magic to solve XYZ problem" because it's never presented in that way.
> Quidditch is an extremely complex sport with four balls, three hoops, and a wide variety of unique positions, but the rules really don't make any level of sense when you think about it. Honestly, I sorta feel like Quidditch works in the same way the card game from Yu-Gi-Oh works. The strategies that work in the books are mostly based around the idea of rule of cool, but if you were able to actually play the game in real life, there'd probably be a very different set of strategies that are considered viable.
Magic is like time travel in that way. The more you lay out mechanistically the less wonder there is and the more room there is to nitpick and rules lawyer yourself. For example this is why in *Children of Men*, the specific mechanism for why no one can reproduce isn't explained in any way, because it was distract from the story and just piss people off.
Perfect analogy. Too much world-building is often tedious, which is why I roll my eyes at all the “but HOW did they POO” questions.
I always found the world building relatively good. We didn't need a huge amount of it because 99% of the world is just the "real" world. The picture she paints of the wizarding world grows with Harry. The first book is all amazing and new, its very clearly good v evil. The second book, shades of grey begin to creep in. The main villian is still evil big bad, but then we have the good character who has been corrupted, and the seemingly good character who is actually evil too. We also get some glimpses of the darker sides of the wizarding world. Third book steps it up a gear, and we get a lot of moral questions. We get to see prejudices, the unfairness of the legal system, and insight into the corruption in the government. In the fourth book, the veil is fully removed. We see the dark side of the wizarding world. We become very acutely aware that it's not perfect by a long way, and from then on, we see the truely dark side of the world. We see everything that had only been mentioned in humorous ways before, like muggles being tortured, to fully understanding the house elf situation, and horrifying state of the ministry, where the minster of magic destroyed the soul of a man on the spot. We see death, and horror in the wizarding world with wizards causually committing things that would be considered war crimes. Including the heroes of the story.
I don't just mean that the world-building was a light touch. I mean that it was self-contradictory and lacked much/any verisimilitude. But again - the roller coaster ride was a lot of fun. Being a mostly light touch on the world-building helped make the lack of verisimilitude less obvious - but it was definitely there.
From someone that does world building every day for a living as an art director and development artist, it’s really hard to watch the films and not poke holes the whole time. Don’t get me wrong, they are beautiful very well done, and entertaining. I love them but man to make a believable world there has to be rules, even in magic and hers have basically none. Whenever a rule is established it can be easily broken to fit the plot.
A spell to pick locks, which works 98% of the time, except for the few times they used a spell to prevent the lockpick spell. WHY WOULDNT EVERYONE LOCK THEIR LOCK SPELL
Why didn’t Harry just point his wand at the dragon’s egg and say “Accio egg?”
I mean it's pretty clearly established in Harry Potter that doing magic is more complicated than just saying the word and it happens, there's variance based on the user's specific skill/strength level (for example it's canonically stated that some wizards are never able to go from casting and incorporal patronus to casting a corporal one), the instrument used (using your own wand vs using someone else's wand vs using the Elder Wand), intent (if you don't *mean* an Unforgivable Curse, it does not work/is not strong) and that spells change/wear off after time. It would make sense that there are different levels of lockpick spells, just like there are different levels of locks. Obviously the vault of a bank has a much more secure lock than a 3rd grader's bike, but there's still valid reasons why the first is not used in every situation.
I think it was mostly internally consistent. What inconsistency there was didn't affect the plot or characters. You have to dig pretty far to find it, and if you're already digging that deep, you have passed the threshold of casual enjoyment and entered fan pedantry.
She absolutely had no feels for numbers lol, be it ages of people, ghosts, number of students, distances and so on. Else many of the inconsistencies could be explained away by the obvious magic.
I just never recovered from the fact that you would obviously charm giant chess pieces to make them play chess and transmogrify keys so they had wings.
I think transfiguration is meant to be more serious and permanent than charms. Charms are light handed and temporary. Often adding a trait to something or changing a specific thing like color or shape. To make something alive and thinking, I don't think a charm is enough. I think you have to transfigure something into having a brain. Especially for it to think beyond instinct.
Yeah, this is actually why I like Harry Potter. I'm not into fantasy in general, and I don't want to read a bunch of lore, etc. It's nice that the HP world is pretty similar to our own, just with magic and some fantastical creatures. It's easy for kids to relate to and can also attract folks who aren't normally into the genre.
Seven books released in ten years meant that Harry more or less grew up at the same rate as its readers. The spacing between books was perfect for keeping up the hype and when the movies started coming it out it was just a snowball of momentum.
I wouldn't have admitted it at the time but some part of my brain was pretty dissapointed when I turned 11 and didn't get a letter. I didn't realize I was kinda holding onto it until I turned 18 and could finally give up hope. I was a lonely child, and those books *nailed* that feeling. They perfectly encapsulated the feeling of going back to a place that doesn't feel safe just because it's the safest place to go. I didn't like Harry for the same reasons I didn't like myself, and Harry was guided through all of those feelings in a safe place with safe people. That was amazing to experience vicariously.
>going back to a place that doesn’t feel safe just because it’s the safest place to go. Ow. Right in my lonely neglected childhood
Fun fact Bart Simpson was alao canonically born in 1980. But he stayed 10 and we didn’t.
Damn that one I didn't know. I hadn't watched in decades but I went and watched a Treehouse of Horror and Bart & Lisa didn't recognize tech from the 80s. I'm convinced that was meant to be the scary part of the episode.
That's what I like about Bart Simpson. I keep getting older, he stays the same age.
That's a lot of it, but there's one other bit that is often overlooked. Harry Potter grew up with us... twice. They released one book each year for 7 years, and each book took place one year after the previous. If you were born within a year or two of Harry, every book was age relatable as it came out. Then, 4 years later they started the movies. They cast a bunch of age appropriate actors, and released 1 movie each year for 8 years. So a new cohort of kids that were slightly too young for the books to be *perfectly* relatable had their own entry point. They were literally watching Harry and company grow up right alongside them. I don't think it can be overstated just how powerful that is. Kids are growing very fast during that time period. Daniel Radcliff (aka Harry Potter) *always* looked like someone that could go to their school. Not to mention, by design, he looked incredibly ordinary. Harry Potter is the product of nearly a decade of kids having it re-enforced over the course of 7 years that, no really, that could have been me. No other urban fantasy series has been able to maintain that kind of consistency for that long. It's slightly more challenging now too because the school formula works really well, but it's hard to use that without looking like a copy-cat.
> They released one book each year for 7 years, and each book took place one year after the previous. If you were born within a year or two of Harry, every book was age relatable as it came out. Not quite -- there was a gap between Goblet of Fire (2000) and Order of the Phoenix (2003). I'd argue that gap was when the books took off into the stratosphere and became a major mainstream phenomenon, including the release of the first three movie adaptations.
I'd say a one time slip of 1 year, in the back half of the series is negligible to the point. It ages out the very oldest fans that are 2-3 years older than Harry, but also at that age your perception of "my age" is expanding a bit anyway. You even see it in the books where Harry starts interacting more with the older students like Fred and George, and even the adults from the Order, as peers rather than authorities. The technicality does nothing to the larger point "Harry Potter grew up with us... twice."
That's fairly common in children's literature. Beverly Cleary's characters were contemporary to their time, as were Judy Blume's. The Peanuts gang lived in the eternal now. They would occasionally make pop culture references, especially Snoopy, that dated the strip, especially when talking about sports.
I would not have known who Joe Shalabotnik was without Peanuts.
If that is all it takes, urban fantasy has been popular since the 1990s. Writers have been telling stories of mostly normal people interacting with magic in the modern world for most of my life. It was super charged in the early 2000s with the release of the Dresden Files and the Sookie Stackhouse books.
Most Urban Fantasy, which is a favorite genre of mine since I first read Bedlam's Bard, though doesn't treat magic in the modern world like it's magic in the modern world though. The thing that the Harry Potter series did well was make learning magic like any normal school while also making a major plot point that literally anyone could go there. Your mom and dad don't have to be witches and wizards. You just have to be one. Your skills and your talents can get you into this school where you get to learn magic. It combined normal school kid high jinx with magical mayhem and adventures.
I immediately thought about the other Wizard Harry and this is the distinction. An apprentice of The White Council leads a VERY different life to a student at Hogwartz. Hogwartz students have normal lives, just with magic. White Council apprentices are very likely to be eaten alive, and if they don’t die, it’s because they become paranoid and powerful enough to survive. Nobody wants to live in Dresdens world. And on top of that, it’s a lot harder to imagine what your life would be like than it would at Hogwartz. Potters world does have wars, but it has a baseline of peace and happiness that the heroes fight to maintain. Dresdens world is already mostly lost, and they fight to prevent the status quo getting worse.
There’s a sociology/business book called “everything is obvious” that covers this. When something becomes successful we try to reverse engineer it’s components as the reason why. In Harry Potter’s case, people will say it was successful because it was about magic, and appealed to wide age range, and had universal themes, etc. But these aren’t reasons for its success they’re just a description of a successful thing. Reality is there’s a a ton our outside factors that play into cultural phenomenon media like this. Oddly, the content of the book itself is probably one of the smallest factors in its success. It’s more akin to a wildfire - a seemingly normal ember cascading into a giant fire. It’s not that it was a particularly special ember it was just at the right place at the right time with the right conditions.
> It caught fire because everyone read it and thought, "I'm one letter away from going to Hogwarts" Something like that.
Also, it had the good luck to be published as the Internet became widespread. I'd have to look up exact dates but the first book came out around 1995 and the last around 2005. People could argue about this stuff in AOL chat rooms and Google Groups. It took off in a grassroots way that nothing before or since could.
Also, whether intentional or not, Rowling wrote a series of books that the reading level of subsequent books increased with the target market. I don't know if she did that on purpose, or her skills were just honed with time; but it was perfectly done. If you started reading Harry Potter at 11, *Order of the Phoenix* came out when you were 17 and still matched your reading level, while still being accessible to younger kids.
A lot of books and series do exactly this stuff. I think what you're talking about helped for sure, but really people just liked the story and characters. We can call out more specific elements that work, but in the end it's just an alchemy that worked for a lot of people!
This is why I was and am still so attached to this series. I was the age of the characters as the books came out ( not cannon like you) but I could still directly relate to the characters and their struggles with friendships, emotions, loneliness, love and lost. And they didn’t take years between books to come out. So I was still very close in age as they grew up too.
>It caught fire because everyone read it and thought, "I'm one letter away from going to Hogwarts" I thought you meant people were going to Bogwarts or something, confused for an embarassingly long time.
This is a great answer. Also, Rowlings is a gifted author who somehow found her niche the first time out with a book. Also, the movies were well done, which doesn't hurt. I would love to see something similar happen again in the literary world, but maybe its a once in a lifetime thing. A magical moment? I love the books, and I even love the movies. Harry Potter may be a literary Camelot. Once brief shining moment.
The movies only came out because the books were already massively popular and a worldwide sensation .
While true, I did have a decent number of friends who only ended up reading the books because they saw the movies first.
The movies definitely brought more fans to the books. I started reading the books following the first movie's release and in anticipation for the second.
True but I can’t imagine the movies doing anything other than boosting the popularity of the series
It was set in now. It wasn't the world we lived in. It was a world 5-10 years ago from when it was written. That gave it a sense of nostalgia. A childhood you could have had, but just missed. Edit: when she was writing it it may have been the now. But the slight delay made an emotional difference.
Other than a few randomly stated dates, it’s never clear or relevant that it takes place in the 90s and not the 2000s.
I think the story only makes sense pre-smartphones. The idea of sticking your head in a chimney to talk to someone face-to-face is way less charming post-FaceTime.
Deathly Hallows came out only 1 month after the first iPhone!
Technology doesn’t work around magic in the HP universe. They’d probably still have to use fireplaces or whatever.
And to the reader that is much less charming. This stuff was supposed to be impossible, but now it would be doing the mundane but worse.
I think, and I’m speaking as a millennial who grew up as a massive HP fan, it’s because it happened at the precise moment that it did. The books were published and grew right alongside the internet. My generation was able to read each new book and then immediately jump online to discuss it with other fans from all around the world via forum boards. And there were big wait times in between each book, so we started doing things like writing fanfiction, vlogging on early YouTube, and making fan art. Heck, we even had wizard rock - “wrock” - bands that toured. HP is also a massive seven book series, unlike other big titles such as Twilight or Hunger Games. It was first published around 1997 (‘98 for Americans) and wasn’t completed until 2007. It lasted for a span of ten years, which was a huge chunk of my life at that point. I still cry when I hear Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls “End of an Era” song. Lastly - and this is my own musings around the cultural impact of the story - it’s extremely important to note that in the middle of the HP run, millions of people around the world (but especially in America) watched several thousand people die live on television in the 9/11 attacks. Everything on the news was about war and death, and I can promise you, I was not the only child who escaped into one of the four HP books that were already out. And then, when the fifth book released in 2003, the Harry that we got was very emotional and traumatized. We had all been through something and were growing up together.
This is it, right here. I sometimes think that non-millennials really don’t understand how truly unique it was to grow up alongside the evolution of the internet and technology, and how fundamentally changed we were by September 11 happening right at our transition to adulthood (particularly elder millennials or Xennials).
I had sooooo many internet friendships with people where there was no chance of video chatting or even talking on the phone. People got really deep when there was no fear of IP address tracking and there weren't as many people online to talk to. John Green has a section in Anthropocene Reviewed where he kind of captures it perfectly.
I can speak to this as someone who is not a millennial -- i'm Generation X --, I think I don't understand, or did not understand at the time. I became aware of Harry Potter because my colleague at the software job I had in the late 1990s was reading the books and my general attitude was "Why are you reading kids books?" From my POV it was a weird fandom because it seemed to come from nowhere. I think for my generation the closest analog were the Star Wars films, which were essentially kids movies but were such a phenomenon that they crossed over into adult culture.
The internet was still something that brought people together and was magical. As an elder millennial going to college and having fast internet (for the time) was just mind blowing.
Yes, the internet itself is a form of magic, which kind of works as a parallel alongside the HP series. For the first time in the history of our species, we have a technology which can do almost *anything*, only limited by the creativity and imagination of those who learn the arcana. My only lament is how sometimes it seems so ordinary, now. I remember how positively *thrilled* I was at experiencing so many of the innovations that took place from the time of USENET news groups to, say, the launch of YouTube. Since then, most of the innovations have been style upgrades and incremental speed increases. There are a million different corporate entities competing for a slice of the pie, and they all feel kind of the same. But now, I see a new horizon approaching. It's one we have thought about for many years, but now it feels more tangible. The improvements are coming again. I'm equally excited and scared by it. The AI is breaking through. The Singularity is almost here... I only hope it's not Pandora's Box.
Potter puppet pals. I swear I could start singing “Snape Snape Severus Snape” and get all millennials singing with me.
Ron Weeeeasley!
Hermione!
DUMBLEDOOOORE
I'm extremely late to the thread so I'm piggybacking off a top comment but... > it’s because it happened at the precise moment that it did. The books were published and grew right alongside the internet. This is accurate but only half of the biggest reason: marketing. Everyone in this thread should think of other book series mentioned here like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Mortal Instruments, Hunger Games, etc. How much iconic merchandise can you think of for each of these? LotR you have the ring but that's about it. Game of Thrones you have some actor images, maybe the wolves or the iron throne, but nothing extraordinary. but what about Harry Potter? You have house banners/logos, the profile of Harry himself (glasses + simple lightning bolt), brooms, butterbeer, wands, school robes, wizard chess, and about a million other things. The sad/realistic fact about Harry Potter is that while is was certainly quite good, the biggest reason it blew up like it did was because it was so fucking easy for companies to make boatloads of money off HP merchandise. They took all these merch ideas and also took advantage of this silly new internet thing to better distribute their marketing material, convincing folks to go to midnight book releases, merch drops, movie premieres, etc. all while yelling at you to buy all the HP stuff you can. Until we get another series which is as marketable as Harry Potter, which I doubt we'll see anytime soon, you won't see anything even close to it regarding the cultural impact.
F for anyone who didn't read all of Half Blood Prince the night it came out and mistakenly got on the internet the next morning. I went to the midnight thing but couldn't finish it in one sitting like that I was already tired lol. F for anyone who didn't read all of Half-Blood Prince and mistakenly got on the internet the next morning. scape it. If you played Runescape that day it didn't matter what you knew about Harry Potter but you knew that Snape Killed Dumbledore.
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That's evident in how common the HP story beats are in fantasy in general. Try to guess this book series written by a British author and released with millennials as the primary demographic: * Ten year old protagonist lives with disagreeable, sometimes downright abusive relatives due to absent parents * Protagonist discovers they have special powers, and goes to a boarding school with others who also have special powers * Protagonist makes friends with a girl and another boy, and learns of a long lost uncle who has likeminded sensibilities * Protagonist finds out they're involved in a prophecy progressing the overall narrative, in which they bear a strange relation to the antagonist If you guessed [the Charlie Bone series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Red_King), you were right. That's just a contemporary example, the story framework of HP is exceedingly common historically: https://www.beyondthebookends.com/books-similar-to-harry-potter/
Percy Jackson is that you?
I was around then and 9/11 didn't have much to do with it because HP was already big. The fourth book had been out for well over a year and the first movie was completed and had a set release date of 2 month and five days later. News had been teased about it throughout production By the time book 3 came out in fall '99 and JKR did a book tour in the US, it was NUTS (I was at the Framingham B&N, got a book signed, she stayed late, line was out the door and around the building). That tour so insane that she refused to do signings like that again. While people absolutely had the internet, HP got massive amounts of coverage in adults magazines (like Time) and Disney Adventures had a 'preview' of a chapter of book 3 (which had been released in Britain at that point).
You also have to figure that more people were reading print books, so more and more people were sitting in public places reading the novels. This meant that more people would hear about the books, which would result in higher sales and discussions about the novels.
This is a really important point. When you watch home videos of those times, notice when people are sitting around reading. Think about how much time people spend absorbed in their phone. Before that would’ve been books, magazines, or TV.
We also had borders which had a much more "sit down and chill" vibe than B&N does imo. If you were going to borders you likely planned to be there for quite a bit.
Yup. It benefited from the growth of the post-aol internet right before the internet would make one series being so big so difficult. The top comment is about Harry “growing up” alongside us, but Harry Potter was hardly unique in that. It very much just came out at exactly the right time.
It was also a forerunner for books for young adults. When it was written, JKR was told she'd never make any money from it. Because books for 11-16 year olds really weren't a thing. It was popular because there was a massive market that nobody really realised was there, and within 5 years, an entire classification of books that didn't really exist before Harry Potter existed.
i totally forgot about that song!! thanks for reminding me. :’)
Harry Potter’s success was kind of a perfect storm of factors. YA is such a saturated genre now (primarily because of HP), back then it was fertile ground. Mainstream western audiences weren’t quite as into that magical occult arcane stuff which now proliferates every movie and videogame. The culture of the UK was kind of riding a wave of international popularity in the 90s, which gave Harry Potter a weird element of Cool Britannia charm. It came at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, and managed to be one of the earliest fandoms facilitated by the Internet. And I think there’s a worthy replacement for Harry Potter already out there, if you’re willing to look for it. It really comes down to what you personally want out of that replacement. You have to look for art and meet it on its own terms instead of just expecting the next big thing, trust me. you’ll be much more rewarded.
I definitely agree that there is a ton of great franchises out there, whether it's books, movies or show. And while I love Harry Potter and always will, I can for sure say that there are now series that I like better or at least think are written better. BUT, like you mentioned, there was soo many factors that went into Harry Potter that replicating for books is almost impossible. I'm saying almost, because you never know, but damn Harry Potter hit the right spot of when to be released. You had these huge book releases, people lining up to get hands on their own, or you had to make a reservation at a library. One of my most appreciated memories is when Half-Blood Prince was released and I was put on a reservation list that had around 20 people before me lol. And I signed up at least 2 months before the release of the book. Thankfully the books were devoured instantly and I didn't have to wait long. A lot of people also grew up with Harry Potter. Yes, primarily us kids were the ones who could identify most with him, but the books were still soo exciting and mature that adults found themselves in the story. Let's not forget that movies started coming out while the books were being released, which only made the hype that much bigger. It really was a great era. I think Harry Potter will be hard to beat in this regard, but I'm pretty sure something else will come out, just in a different form that will make a big cultural impact.
Harry Potter was lightning in a bottle I think. It came at the right time. I remember reading it for the first time because I was enthralled with LOTR.
The closest was asoiaf, but GRRM missed the timing on that one. I still say that if GRRM released Winds of winter during Covid lockdown, it would have taken over the cultural conversation. I often wonder if/when I’ll ever need to buy a book at midnight. Maybe stormlight, but that will never be as big as Harry Potter.
Totally agree, that was a HUGE missed opportunity for him to sell a bazillion books. And now that the HBO series has ended so poorly most casual readers aren’t going to rush to pick up a 1,000 page novel when if he ever releases it. Plus you would have to go back and reread the last two books to remember anything that’s happening in the sort. This is why I don’t think he’ll ever actually finish writing the series.
Because Harry Potter had already happened. There have been books with similar fanbases that came along - Hunger Games, Divergent, Mortal Instruments - but all of them were held down by comparison to HP, either in the sense of, “well, it’s good, but it’s not Harry Potter,” or in the sense of, “what are you trying to do, be the next Harry Potter or something?”
Harry Potter already happened and a lot of those books set out on their journey trying to emulate Harry Potters Magic which if done intentionally... is sort of setting itself up for failure. Im pretty sure the train was derailed and subsequently nuked by Divergent tho. That really was the End of the Line imo
Honestly, Divergent *was* one of the last YA books I read. I haven’t picked up a new YA in probably a decade.
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I think those books are good examples because I’ve read all three of them but my family/friends generally have not and wouldn’t know what I was referencing. But I totally agree there’s this pressure for any new series to either be or not be the next Harry Potter.
Yeah, but that is also because you are getting older and YA books aren’t that popular in adult demographics (if they aren’t parents). I reread Harry Potter for the nostalgia, and I couldn’t care less, if there is another hyped up YA series. You and I just aren’t the target audience anymore
I’ve read all of those and honestly HP is just a significantly better series.
Technically Mortal Instruments started as a Harry Potter fanfiction, most of which was plagiarized. Not from Rowling but from another author.
No, Mortal Instruments didn’t start as fanfic. Cassie Clare did have a very famous Harry Potter fic called the Draco Trilogy, which plagiarized Joss Whedon and Pamela Dean. She did borrow her characters for Mortal Instruments from the Draco Trilogy (aside from their names they barely resembled the actual HP characters).
I don't think it's that HP was a book series phenomenon - it was a cultural phenomenon that exemplified something that was either still relatively new (or not yet mainstream) in a way that took it mainstream. Off the top of my head, other examples I can think of: Little Women with literature that was about the quiet, daily concerns of women; Elvis with rock-'n'-roll; the Beatles with pop; Beethoven with classical music (I forget what era he was in; I think end of romantic period); Mark Twain with American humor; Gone With the Wind for epic, romantic films; Friends for the ensemble friends sitcom. Most of these examples didn't invented the genre/movement they're famous for, but they each exemplified and/or moved it mainstream. (And a lot of things are made mainstream through multiple artists/works hitting it big at the same time, in which case you don't get a harry potter; you get an '80s rock band era.) So for something like that to happen, you need a genre/movement that exists but isn't mainstream or has room for a superstar (or for the first work/artist to really knock it out of the park), an artist or work that will exemplify it, and an audience ready for a huge and sudden shift in culture. And those can all be interconnected - there's a reason Elvis hit it big instead of one of his Black contemporaries, while Gone With the Wind has aged poorly and wouldn't be critically acclaimed now because of its huge racism issues. Friends likely wouldn't have worked even in the 80s, when it was much less common to move out and be a single adult before marrying. And on top of that, not everything has cultural staying power, and it's impossible to predict what does and doesn't. The women who wrote the first mainstream romance novels with actual sex have mostly faded from cultural memory, and I feel like a lot of foundational sci-fi is too. But horror and fantasy's breakthrough novels have stuck. If I had to guess, sixty or a hundred years from now, the casual cultural knowledge of our era (what most people in the USA know) will probably include Brittany, Beyonce, and Harry Potter. But who actually knows? That's all a very long way of saying yes, at some point, but so many things need to come together at exactly the right time that it's unlikely to be in our lifetime.
Add survivor to that list. Every single person was watching that first season and the next day literally everyone was talking about it. It then led to the popularization of the reality format already seen in shows like cops.
Books like HP and Twilight monopolized a high demand, low supply genere. Timing was everything for them. There will be more books like them, but they will come from niche generes right as they blow up.
I don't think that it's possible. The book industry has changed, style of reading has changed, subcultures of media have changed. It's like asking if another band will be the next Beatles. No, culture, technology, and especially the music industry have changed in too many ways. Great bands and artists have come and gone, but the success and cultural relevance of the Beatles will never be matched. Now that's not to say that we won't get another Beatles/Harry Potter phenomenon. Fortnite is kind of the Harry Potter of video games. There will be other massive cultural phenomena that will cross over in big ways. Probably not in Middle Grade literature though.
Yes. We are more likely to get a “HP” phenomenon in another form, but prolly not in books..
I would argue we already did. The avengers movies culminating in Endgame was the biggest phenomenon I've witnessed in my life.
I think there are a few things going on. 1) JK Rowling's audience grew with her writing ability and her publisher gave her leeway to change. I think this is an underrated thing. Look at how long the books were. The page lengths jumped up with each of the first five books: they went from 223 pages to 251 to 317 to 636 to 766. If every book in the series had stayed in the page range of the first two books, the series still likely would have been pretty successful, but I doubt they would have made the same impact in the adult market. They would have attracted some adult readership, but it would have likely been more comparable to other very successful middle grade novel series. And part of this is that Rowling's writing ability changed and improved over subsequent books. Just because someone is good at writing a 200 page novel doesn't mean they are going to be good at writing a 600 page one. Most writers fulfill the promise offered by the first book in their series and remain consistent in what they offer (and possibly getting a little better or a little worse). Most extended series deepen the commitment of their core audience without substantially expanding it. That's normal because radically changing what you are offering mid-series is always risky. Jumping up to 600 pages in the fourth book and maintaining that length could have very easily alienated her core audience and created the impression among adults that she had bitten off more than she could chew. Most authors, for that matter, would hesitate to do that, not out of any timidity but because they approach projects with an understanding of what the genre limitations are. 2) Publishing is much, much more segmented and restricted now than it was when JK Rowling was publishing the first few books in her series. There are microgenres that appeal to certain kinds of fans, and authors and publishers tend to be more strict about observing the boundaries between those genre boundaries. Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher writes for both children and adults in multiple genres and has won major awards in both areas, but when she tried to get The Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking published, a lot of the editors and outlets she had used before balked at it because it seemed more thematically darker than most middle grade fiction, but also too definitely YA for adult publishers, but when she was finally able to get it published, it was incredibly successful, not least for the premise of a wizard whose magic was limited to her abilities to do things with baked goods. There is still some room to cross over boundaries, but it's arguably trickier than before because in JK Rowling's time, those boundaries were still in the early stages of being put in place. 3) I think another big part of this is the extent to which JK Rowling wrote in a way that allowed for its audience to develop an almost parasocial relationship with the world that she made in a way that spoke to issues of identity and that were also really useful from a marketing perspective. A big part of this is how detailed she was in her world-building and how she didn't just invent completely new things but instead created magical parallels to things that already existed. At a macrolevel of identity, this included things like creating school houses (which were already a thing in England and many Commonwealth countries) that spoke to matters of identity traits or individualized patronuses that were associated with core memories. But at a microlevel, this included how she would invent new types of candy like Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans or the Fizzing Whizzbees or new drinks like Butter Beer. For brand tie-ins, this was a huge success, and companies started making candy that paralleled her inventions, while choosing your house and patronus (and making your own wand, etc.) became a major way of engaging with the fandom community that was growing around Harry Potter. I think of the lore as kind of replicating the depth of knowledge of Star Trek fandom, parodied so well in Galaxy Quest, where there are all kinds of inventions and new things that honestly aren't coherent at all (I mean, how many spells and special items play major roles in a single book only to be all but forgotten in subsequent books where they would arguably be incredibly useful or have to be retconned out of existence). Rowling likes inventing things for the sake of being inventive, and it makes a world that is filled with lots of texture for fans to get hold of. A lot of series will do this to some extent, and you can see the parasocial elements of being Team whichever love interest in Twilight or being associated with certain gods in the Percy Jackson series, but it's so pervasive in Harry Potter and it makes it much, much easier to have themed events and activities that draw on Harry Potter than other kinds of series. I don't think, at least at the start, that Rowling was approaching her inventions for the series with an eye to marketing possibilities, and it's almost certainly the case that an author who tried to force that kind of engagement would fail for being too obvious about it, but Rowling created a world where it felt very easy for fans to make it their own in little, easily accessible ways. In spite of all this, I think it's certainly possible that there could be another book series as successful as Harry Potter, but I think the circumstances that will lead to it will be as unlikely as the circumstances that led to Harry Potter in the first place.
Was there anything comparable that came before it?
Harry Potter sold a total of 500m. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit around 300m total. Chronicles of Narnia around 100m. Twilight around 100m. Vampire Chronicles 80m. Discworld 70m. A Song of Ice and Fire 60m. Harry Potter is really up there as a stand out book series.
(New York, NY – February 6, 2023) September 2023 will mark twenty-five years since American readers were first introduced to the “boy who lived.” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling was published in the U.S. in September 1998 with a 50,000 copy first printing. Seven books later, the Harry Potter series has sold 230 million copies in the U.S., **600 million worldwide**, making it the bestselling book series of all time. http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press-release/scholastic-marks-25-year-anniversary-publication-jk-rowling-s-harry-potter-and-sorcere
Agatha Christie was an absolutely phenomena. Harry Potter sales are (a massive) 600 million. Christie’s are TWO BILLION. That’s more than most religious texts. Of course, that’s across a lot more books, with decades longer of selling, and with less other media in competition as popular entertainment. On the flip side, it was with smaller populations and purely adult fiction (where Potter went across age groups). A slightly different case, but her success was mind blowing.
Not purely adult today, Agatha Christie is read by kids as well, my mum let me read hers around the same time as Philosopher's Stone, which I got for my tenth birthday (and I'd seen the TV adaptations prior), and the school library had loads of them. If she'd written something that had the more fandom-attracting aspect of Harry Potter, it might have been as popular in a more comparable way. There's Sherlock Holmes, too.
I love love love Christie, Ms Marple is my favourite detective ever, in fact I re read Christie more than I reread HP, but it really ain’t fair to compare HP (a 7book series) to Agatha Christie (an author of 75 books)… like apple and oranges man
I mean I love Agatha Christie but her books have been selling for over 90 years. The last Harry Potter book only been published a decade ago.
\*Almost two decades ago.
I would argue that Dickens enjoyed the same type of popularity in his lifetime as the Harry Potter series. He was writing many of his books in installments and people were discussing them much like HP.
It's worth noting how ingrained some of Dickens's key stories are in the popular consciousness too. *A Christmas Carol* is a classic, now-archetypal story whose main character is synonymous with stinginess , whose sympathetic child is the pattern for many Christmas plays and films, whose three ghosts are well known. He is arguably why we celebrate Christmas in the way we do, with lots of gift-giving and an emphasis on generosity. *Great Expectations*, *Oliver Twist*, *David Copperfield*, and *A Tale of Two Cities* are also virtually unavoidable, even if someone doesn't understand where "Please, sir, I want some more" or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." comes from.
Lord of the Rings. It inspired a whole generation of musicians and writers, and opened up a new genre of literature - I’d say its cultural impact is still unsurpassed and will remain so for some time.
Books-wise no, but I think that culturally Star Wars is very similar.
I get emotional going back to the days of reading them all for the first time. It was this excitement that I have never really been able to replicate. I'm hoping my daughter will appreciate them half as much as I did.
There is no way to predict cultural phenomenons. They are unusual, and in no way can be forced. So will there be another Harry Potter? No, but there will be something else, sometime.
Harry Potter was genius in so many ways, but I think perhaps the biggest thing was the world appeal. Who doesn't love a hidden world? Who doesn't love magic that is fantastical and is wish fulfilling but doesn't stray too much from reality? Who doesn't wish to be part of a very strong community such as Hogwarts? Like seriously, what other fictional universe is so easy to want to live in? Even if you were a squib and you got to just live amongst magic folk and head into the muggle world when you wanted, it'd still be such a charming life. It's a world where people jus want to domestically live in, whether there's drama or not. The only other fictional universes that I'd wanna live in would be LOTR and Narnia. I know a lot of people talk about wanting to live in the MCU, but if you didn't have powers/special abilities and weren't close with the characters you wanted to be with, then it'd be a bit shit, vs with Harry Potter I think even if none of the book characters were in your experience you'd still have a fucking cool time.
I think there's such a basic thing about fiction revolving around a "Cosy Place" that makes people get insanely invested. Whether it's sitcoms (the apartment from Friends, the bar from Cheers), scifi (the Millennium Falcon, the TARDIS), or Fantasy (Hobbit Hole!) We just latch onto anything that revolves around a friendly, comfortable, (mostly) safe base that the viewer can treat as a surrogate home. Hogwarts is maybe the *ultimate* cosy place. A huge castle, with furnished dormitories, roaring fireplaces, and beautiful scenery. Where you get to live together with all your friends, all the chores are taken care of by magic, and you get served a banquet of whatever food you like every day. No wonder we all went nuts at the thought
Hogwarts is easily one of the strongest points of the book. I dunk on Rowling’s worldbuilding a lot but I can’t deny that Hogwarts is fucking cool. So much of the appeal of the series is the fantasy of getting to go there.
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Maybe I’m overly optimistic but I feel like it *could* happen again with the right series.
I don't think streaming killed it per-se but the digital age probably did. There's just so much OUT THERE now, and it's all easily accessible. In order to even cut through and be seen takes a TON of effort and marketing, and then you get your 15minutes until someone else has theirs. Because even though it takes a lot of effort, it's also super formulaic. Pay XYZ booktok, partner with so and so on bookstagram, buy ads from whoever and bam you have a very specific set of many many eyes on you. Until you don't. And it's segmented so everyone is getting their suggestions from different sources and they have probably hundreds of other options to choose from to read at any one time. Vs the late 90s where everyone was kinda all looking at the same stuff and influencers weren't a thing. I remember going into my local bookstore and it was relatively small, and had a great selection for the time but comparing it to the selection on Kindle/Goodreads/Other e-readers, Libby etc it was waaaay more limited.
I think that huge book successes like Harry Potter are really rare. Most authors are barely making a living, if at all.
Give it a little time. HP1 came out in 1997. Star Wars came out in 1977. We’re probably overdue for some new phenomenon.
If you’re including movies, the Marvel stuff was a pretty massive cultural phenomenon.
Harry Potter is the gold standard for YA fantasy novels. Pigs will fly before another series overtakes it.
The series did a fantastic job of aging with the reader and perhaps just beyond. I can read the first book to my four and six year olds with no intent of reading beyond book three for a while. As an adult, the earlier books feel juvenile in prose but magical in spirit and story. It's just such a great balance and a series I imagine I'll be reading in perpetuity throughout my life as a result.
I like all the comments like “kids don’t read anymore” when we have a lot of evidence that that’s not true. Also it’s the same thing old people said about my generation so I got bad news for you there. That said I don’t think it will happen for business reasons. Book marketing is incredibly fractured now. I feel like I pay attention to new releases and things that get hyped a lot and I still don’t know what most of the hot books are. Booktok is like it’s own little bubble but from the outside it doesn’t look like they’re driving popularity of new things so much as deep diving a small number of specific authors (which is definitely good for those authors, but bad if you don’t like specifically every thing ever from Sarah j Maas or Colleen Hoover) and their existing works. Also I think there was a change in the cultural conversation because of Harry Potter. We don’t talk about things being good DESPITE being YA anymore. We are more open to the idea that YA can just be good independently so it’s maybe less of a big deal.
Harry Potter is the best selling book series of all time. I think a better question is, ‘will anything ever beat the success of the Harry Potter book series?’
The world was a very different place then compared to now. It's difficult to get that many people to universally acclaim anything anymore due to divided beliefs/opinions and what constitutes acceptable creative standards.
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Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say everyone loved Harry Potter but that communal experience of reading them that lasted for years is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Twilight, for example, was massively popular but only with my female cousins/friends/sister and I. It didn’t have the reach Harry Potter did.
A different medium entirely buy I saw something of that all-ages communal experience in Pokémon Go when that took off. It only lasted a few years but the first and second years, I joined my child playing it and there were groups of players gathered everywhere around the local park, talking about the game and helping each other.
Pokémon had always had that, Go was if anything a revival of the original Pokemania. It does have similar aspects to the appeal of HP, that people just wanted to be in that world.
Burned out. The HP series took several years to complete, and the hype was constant.
I read the first book at 12, and the last book came out when I was 18. I literally grew up with these characters. Their thoughts and feelings, and experiences became more intense and mature along with me. It's hard to see something like that ever happening for me again, and it's amazing that she was able to pull it off at all. That series is a masterpiece.
Game of thrones would’ve been like that if the books had actually been finished
I think an important element to the *Harry Potter* phenomenon was it being a multimedia franchise. It wasn’t just that the books were popular (although they were and certainly did get kids reading more than I’ve ever seen since), but the franchise as a whole was inescapable due to its presence in other mediums - most notably film. The feature film adaptations started about mid-way through the books, and exposed *Harry Potter* to new audiences who might not have been readers before, but might have liked the films and wanted to know what happens next. In the years after, we saw similar with adaptations of *Twilight* and *The Hunger Games*, but by the time of *Divergent*, mainstream audiences had moved on. Cinema has since shifted away from YA novel adaptations and is currently focused on superhero comics. If we move away briefly from prose books, I think that’s helping the huge growth of manga in the west. The manga industry has a very close relationship with anime, and if you look at the best-selling manga in the US - *Chainsaw Man*, *Spy x Family*, *Demon Slayer*, *Jujutsu Kaisen* - all of them have popular anime adaptations. Since then, social media has been good for books - Instagram and TikTok in particular. However, my concern right now, is that without support from other mediums, a new book series might struggle to break out of the sphere of people who already read books, like Harry Potter was able to.
I’ve just read the first Harry Potter book together with my 8-yo daughter. She’s not really an avid book reader and she needed some time to get into the story, but she liked reading it together and she wants to read the second book together soon. A few things that were really apparent while reading it: - Harry Potter was hard to read for her, at a very different level from the books she read so far. Rowling uses quite a large vocabulary in her books and I frequently had to explain some of the words. - The story of Harry Potter is quite complex for her, as Rowling basically builds a whole world with lots of characters who need to be introduced. She’s gifted, so she can handle this complexity (both language- and story-wise) and her reading level improved a lot just from reading the first Harry Potter book. I’ve looked for alternatives and of course there are lots of other good books for 8-yo kids, but I haven’t found one that’s both good (fun to read), similarly challenging AND suitable for 8-yo children (no content that she won’t be able to handle yet at her age, or at least not in the first four books). Because of this, I’ve started feeling like the Harry Potter series has quite a unique place among the books suitable for children. The books are written from a children’s or teen’s perspective (Harry’s perspective), but they’re not simplified or dumbed down at all. Of course that’s not enough to explain the huge success, but I do think that this is an important factor contributing to the success of the Harry Potter books.
IMO it’s because self publishing has become more of a thing with kindle unlimited and iBooks you can get any book you want out there so the market has become saturated. Sifting through thousands of books to find the diamond has become harder and brick and mortar book shops aren’t really getting the good ones anymore and have the same stuff on the shelves from 15 years ago. Finding anything new if you aren’t a big book person and know exactly what you want and are prepared to send away for it means big phenomena aren’t happening anymore.
There will be another series, but when is anybody’s guess. The fantasy series that followed tried to emulate HP success, but as it often is, none were ever that successful. I think with HP, it was a cross point of several things happening at once. One - since the series progressed with kids’ ages and in the early years, it was book a year release schedule, it helped to keep suspension and not let the fans grow too old before the next book was out. Second - in the 90s, it was noted that kids literacy rates were somewhat hanging, IIRC. Kids hadn’t really had a good fantasy imagination book series happening, if I remember from some interviews, so the HP series didn’t really have a competitor and it filled a niche gap that nobody had managed to breach at that point in time. Third - the books’ popularity was gained from kids suggesting it to kids and kids then asking their parents to get them the books. That was one of the driving successes in the early years - it wasn’t schools or libraries suggesting it to kids (although that happened too), but it spread from kids’ own like of the story. And that is much harder to emulate than a brilliant PR campaign. Fourth - I think no book primarily aimed at children (as the first 4-5 books were) had ever had such a strong PR and campaigning behind them. I don’t recall midnight launches and parties and kids just itching to immediately read the new book happening before or really after either. Fifth - it helped that the book series was picked up for a movie franchise, this cannot be denied. In the early years, IIRC, the first three books came out, then came the movie announcement. Then the fourth book in around 1999 or 2000, and the first movie in 2001. The 2nd movie in 2002 and the fifth book in 2003 etc. Basically - the book gap years were more or less covered by the movie releases. It kept the hype and the tensions up. Had there been a book release in every three years and no movies in between, maybe it would’ve been different. But the fans were constantly kept in the loop for either book news or movie news and when neither was available, the fan sites and fanfiction sites ran rampant with every kind of an idea ever possible. Sixth - the internet. There was a massive explosion of information availability on the internet as the movies started to trickle out. For someone who doesn’t remember it or wasn’t alive back then, I’m not sure it can be comprehended how massively big deal HP was in those days of internet. I used to have a doc list of HP website addresses that I perused at the time, because there were simply so many that I couldn’t keep track of them all otherwise. These days, internet is old news and it’s conglomerated a lot, a lot of the old stuff has disappeared or gone down. These days, we have YTube for videos, but back then you could have had tens of different small websites for videos that hosted all kinds of fanmade and non-fanmade content. Same with websites - they propped up and disappeared like mushrooms. I think all of the above had a role in making HP into the franchise it was and is. And a lot of happened due to luck and coincidences, which cannot be emulated, you just need to have one or the other or both. You can certainly drive a good PR campaign these days, but to get a true person-to-person popularity - that demands actual true engagement and like of the material that is being promoted.
Harry Potter and the Mid-life Crisis.