Harry Potter isn’t dead yet. That should happen when Harry Potter and the Ineluctably Awful Title is published next month. Some rumours suggest that Harry’s author will then quietly disappear. Whether or not, given that each Potter book has been worse than its predecessor, that is a good thing, from now on we will have to suffer through the search for the next big thing. We will be told that whichever book is being hyped has the same thrill etc etc, and it might. Potter sold for all sorts of reasons, very few of which are actually well-understood by anybody. But the search will be horrible, and it will fail. One day lightning struck a decent book and it’s apparently quiet pleasant author made a bundle of money. You can’t predict that happening. You can’t plan it. I rather wish they wouldn’t try.
The explanations for Harry’s spectacular impact have been endless, including magic over technology. Whatever, the series CONNECTED with young readers in a way science fiction has been unable to do for too long.
I’m going to disagree, Kevin. At the risk of derailing your argument, the HP series succeeded in a way NOTHING has been able to do. Almost, period. SF is irrelevant to this subject. Heck, I think genre fantasy is irrelevant to this. The success of HP comes down to social dynamics and cultural effects that have little to do with anything to do with any kind of genre fiction.
Well it’s all about creating mass momentum. If I understand your point correctly you seem to be suggesting that folk should just let the next one happen rather than trying to force it.
I agree with you that many have and will try and fail. But I don’t think I can go so far as to recommend that all efforts be abandoned.
My point is that you can’t MAKE a Harry Potter. No-one, to my knowledge, has ever done it. And it’s going to get very tiresome hearing a lot of publishers advertising that they’ve found the ‘new HP’. It’s all much the same way anyone with a new acoustic guitar is, for five minutes, the ‘new Dylan’. They never are, and it’s kind of tiresome.
Yeah I can agree with that.
But I’d also add that someone will market something that will explode…