Could you write the next Harry Potter?

If I were desperate enough, and had the time, I could see myself in a cafe with a cup of tea, writing constantly, day after day.

And having it work out.

I’d love to create a franchise that becomes a land at Disneyland or Universal.

It would take a crucible of poverty and desperation to do it.

What does it take?

Only if it were very pornographic.

I don't think I could, no. I could write something that would be cherished by a certain group, but I don't think I could write something that has the mass appeal of Harry Potter. That takes a level of talent that I don't have.

Who would say no to becoming a successful author? JK did while taking care of her infant kids.

Sure, but I’ve done so much crap in my life I’d get cancelled.

It would be more likely if I had a writing partner with whom I could develop the story.

Of all the frau technologies, scrapbooking helps a lot when writing that sort of fiction.

What kind of fantasy topic hasn’t been tapped already? Wizards, vampires, dystopias, gods...

[quote] That takes a level of talent that I don't have.

It doesn’t really take that much talent. All of that writing is written pretty simply, probably at a fourth grade level. It’s not like you’re writing War and Peas.

It’s basically a world-building and extensive outlining exercise. It’s doable.

Sadly what matters more than your own writing is an excellent editor and finding a good publisher who believes in you and promotes the hell out of your work.

And nobody considers being on the NYT Bestseller list an accomplishment anymore after so many authors and publisher game the system by cheating.

Sorry, publishers game the system by cheating.

How do publishers game the system? I've noticed everyone and their aunt's a NYT best seller.

How do you get published? I have so many ideas for a good series. I could self publish on Amazon but I don’t think I would be able to get that made into a movie franchise or theme park land. It has to be a legit book you can buy at Barnes and Nobles before movie producers take you seriously.

DLers have a pretty high average IQ. I think many here could do it.

R11 I'm a big fan of Warren Peas

Much of it has to do with luck. John Bellairs was writing fantasy wizard stories for young adults decades before JKR, they recently made a movie of one of his books, The House with A Clock in Its Walls, but it wasn't a very good adaptation.

Or maybe his book wasn’t that good to begin with.

Ugh Harry Potter is drivel, and even that's not as bad as Twilight, and BOTH are War and Peace compared to 50 Shades.

Buuut, I don't think I could match their success. Writing is surprisingly difficult. Haha I tried to write some smut once and it's surprisingly difficult. (I love reading erotica but 99% of it is garbage and that's where mine was.)

"I've noticed everyone and their aunt's a NYT best seller."

LOL, that's not true at all. Most writers would kill to get on the bestseller list, most are totally anonymous.

'A house with a clock in its walls' was the first 'proper' book I ever bought when I was about 10 or 11.

Even then I remember it wasn't that great, although there was a passage where the protagonist and his uncle (?) were being chased by the baddies. Something about the villain's round glasses being reflected by car light in the rearview mirror freaked me out.

R10 werewolves

The mainstream consumes what the PR machinery tells them to consume. I mean, nobody read 50 Shades of Grey, because it was so well written and thoroughly researched. It was the hype that made people buy it.

Twilight (which inspired 50 Shades of Grey) wasn't that great either. Just hype for the Young Adults genre.

Publishers see dumbed down shit as more profitable and more likely to succeed than books that challenge their readers.

Basically authors have to create the hype for their own work by using social media, become their own brand and selling it. Like, the Frau writing for Fraus, the Mom taking the next step after her big success with her blog, the gay smart-ass wanting to be the gay Agatha Christie.

"It was the hype that made people buy it."

If all it took to make a book successful was hype.....every book would be successful, nothing would ever fail. There are still books that are hyped but fail regardless

Immediately DLers have to note that the stuff isn’t challenging literature but rather it’s crap. We know that already.

R24, werewolves were a huge part of the Twilight franchise.

Maybe aliens? But they were central to the follow-up from the Twilight series author, and it didn't go anywhere.

Sure whilst sitting in the old centre of Edinburgh. Yup, would love to.

I could totally see some DLer doing this. Lots of confident creative types here (not me). Someone with a decent financial cushion moves somewhere inspiring for five years and grinds it out in a cozy setting. Absolutely.

I mean you could write the best epic work of fiction but if the audience doesn't warm up to it, then it would be all for naught. The Twilight crap and the 50 Shades Of Grey crap struck gold, despite their being utter shit, in my opinion

Think I'd prefer to write something more personal and daring that had only modest or minimal success in life, but became respected high literature of societal importance after my zenith or even after my death - think Forster's MAURICE, or Tolkien's works.

I wouldn't cope well with Rowling's level of public scrutiny or commerciality, and I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy a draughty castle of my own or swimming in piles of money if I also had to sleep every night in that castle full of money knowing I was a subpar writer of franchise teen lit that had no resonant meaning.

And yes, I know J.K. got kids to read, she's a feminist icon, she's a good mother, she supports us over T, undsoweiter. I like her, I respect her accomplishments, and I'm not taking that away. But youngsters who truly love to read found literature just fine without her help - I would know, I used to be one.

Neville Longbottom has a bigger Staff than Sean Biggerstaff.

Neville.

Do you know how many wannabe Harry Potters and Twilights have been published and flopped? Now, multiply that number, which is in the thousands, by a thousand again to get the number of manuscripts that have been submitted wanting to do exactly the same but remain unpublished. Publishers know that these phenomena can’t be manufactured, only hoped for.

[quote] Maybe aliens?

There was the TV show called Roswell which was based on YA series books about Teenage Aliens.

[quote] The series is based on the Roswell High young adult book series, written by Melinda Metz and edited by Laura J. Burns, who became staff writers for the television series

And Roswell has already been remade and is on its third season.

[Quote] werewolves were a huge part of the Twilight franchise.

Maybe aliens? But they were central to the follow-up from the Twilight series author, and it didn't go anywhere.

I mean werewolves on their own. No vampires.

And The Host was better compared to Twilight but i wasn't a fan of the ending.

[Quote] And Roswell has already been remade and is on its third season.

Which i'm sure will be a shitshow.

Is anyone here actually doing this? I suspect at least one DLer is.

I think transhuman is the next big thing (people who make themselves virtual in computers).

Neville. Cutest one from the movie now.

Nope. I have no kids. I wouldn't know how to write for kids.

[quote]but I don't think I could write something that has the mass appeal of Harry Potter. That takes a level of talent that I don't have.

J.K. Rowling isn't a great writer. Fine yes, but not great by any means (and her books are aimed for kids). You really just need imagination to come up with the premise (as R12 mentioned). A good editor can take care of the rest.

R42 what would make her a great writer? You need her to be very poetic and/or literary with her words? Sometimes writing simplistically but effectively is better.

I'm sure there are analyst reports that can prognosticate what's going to be hot in five years. Aliens, etc.

Is anyone on DL actually doing this?

R42, what does an editor do? Don't you have to sketch out the entire story, rather than just have a good premise?

I wouldn't have the patience for it.

Identifying the basic building blocks of a young adult fantasy franchise is easy enough and people do it every day, then self publish or get their stuff published by a smaller press. You just need to have an angle that sounds edgy but isn't (capitalism might be bad! it might be cool to be a vampire!) and the ability to create fantasy elements with bits and pieces of modern words. Something like Star Wars and their heavy-handed "Han SOLO" type names or "Avada Kedavra" in Harry Potter, things that quickly and easily trigger ideas in people's minds without them consciously realizing it. Get lucky and you'll end up selling tons and having a well-paying franchise.

The work it takes, though, is exhausting and boring. Only if you're really in love with your own middlebrow idea could you go through with it.

When I was a film writer I was shocked at how many people wrote absolute bullshit, made-up crap about Old Hollywood stars and would publish them with Bear Manor Media or some shitty place. Plagiarism, lies, books crammed with homophobic agendas, sometimes even gibberish were in these books, and people lapped them up. Famous people would write blurbs for them and say "Wow finally a book on Huntley Gordon!" as if just having a book meant it was good. And it never was.

Others would write liner notes for radio shows on CD, where the radio show was in the public domain and thus free, and the liner notes were just Wikipedia articles, lightly edited. These companies would make good money selling CDs to older people who didn't know they were being sold information they could have gotten for free.

Any one of you could make a semi decent living by stealing information from blogs, Wikipedia and Twitter threads and turning it into a book.

There ya go, now don't tell me I never gave you any good advice.

I can't even come up with the simplest fantasy story anymore: it's been beaten out of me by 20+ years of schooling. :(

Do I think I could write it? Yes. Do I think I'd be able to have the right literary agent and publisher do what is necessary to make it a global franchise? Questionable.

To know what works, you have to go to booktube, the nerdy reader Youtube, to see what kinds of books they like (they are good bell weathers for popularity, along with the users on goodreads) and then combine it with things that already work, like wizards and vampires and werewolves. Maybe even try something a little different like Roman god orgies or anarchist fan fiction for some unique flavor. You base it on hot teen boys and frumpy, average looking girls and it will sell like hotcakes with the right team behind it.

And if my gran had had wheels, she would have been a bike.

I've worked in kids and teen publishing for years, and have created one very successful teen book series that's still nowhere near the level of Harry Potter. (You have almost certainly not heard of it.)

JK Rowling is not the most technically skilled writer in the world, but her style is perfect for the audience she was aiming for and the story she was telling. Even so, I don't think it has much to do with the success of the series. The premise is not all that interesting or original either, but it was right for the moment.

Mostly, the success of Harry Potter has to do with an unreplicatable combination of luck, timing, and vision on the part of the people from Scholastic who discovered it and marketed it. (I I'm remembering my history correctly, the first two books had been published in the UK before it was brought to the US and had not been a particular hit.)

I don't think it's likely that there will be another success in kids publishing on this scale in our lifetimes, and if there is, it will again be mostly by accident. The labs where they cook up this kind of thing do exist, and they have had many successes along with many, many flops. But the factors that make something pop in the way that Harry Potter did are mostly beyond anyone's control

I'm listening to Stephen King's "On Writing". He says a good plot finds the writer; inspiration comes at random. That's discouraging.

[Quote] Is anyone on DL actually doing this?

I'm curious about this too.

A lot of times, I've seen threads on here where they randomly ask for our opinions on writing a book/screenplay or who we think someone should cast for a movie and then those names get taken into consideration. The one I'm thinking off the top of my head is when the (I believe) team behind the Tab Hunter biopic that JJ Abrams is working on started a thread asking us who we think should be cast for the role. They denied being behind the project, but it was done at such an odd time (months after the announcement) that it didn't feel like someone just trying to spark up a conversation from a random news story.

So for whichever DLer decides to try their hand at writing that next popular book series, take our advice here. We won't lead you astray.

I haven’t even read one of the books. I tried to watch the first movie but found it extremely annoying. So no, I have no reference point or desire to continue shitting out a pathetic story.

My life would feel meaningful if I could create something that engaged kids in reading, made people happy, and earned me enough wealth to really help my favorite causes.

I had a very conventional suburban upbringing. I find it hard to imagine something new: everything seems to exist already. Of course that's not true, but how do you move forward feeling like you're stealing ideas?

I think creating the characters, giving them distinct and believable personalities and dialogue must be the hardest part. The world-building seems easy in comparison.

The new Harry Potter Store in NYC.

I'm going to read her books again. I'm thinking it'll help me write my own.

The Next Harry Potter? No. A fandom and franchise of that size does not come easy. It is the highest grossing franchise based on a book and JK is the richest author. Book sales alone are worth over 7 Billion dollars. It is one of the top media franchise in the world where it ranks just below Marvel Cinematic Universe (the biggest is Pokemon). None of us saps could make that and if we could we would, and not be wasting time on DL.

R57 I mean, JK Rowling didn’t invent everything in Harry Potter. She couldn’t. Fantasy writing doesn’t work like that. She took existing tropes and notions and made them her own. Of course, she DID create a lot; everything from Quidditch to Hogwarts to many of the mythical creatures. But, she also, like all genre writers, uses common tropes in her genre. That isn’t stealing, that is convention.

No. It is MUCH harder than it looks.

The self-deluded queens on here who are yes or probably should get on it then. Quit your jobs and start writing. Because if you’re so certain, JK Rowling became a billionaire doing what you think doesn’t sound so hard.

[R33], Neville was the boy whose parents got Deatheater'd, yes? And now I have Cornish Pixies floating round my head.

Since it's been over twenty years, I imagine a Potter-like series will mention things like smartphones and social media, right? I wonder if it'll ignore Covid entirely. The Potter series is set between 1991 to 1998. The world's completely different today.

Is there already a Harry Potter-like series or Gen Z?

For some reason Gen Z goofs on Harry Potter.

It's dangerous to publish something these days. Lots of hurdles to overcome. They'll come for you for anything.

Does anyone here use a typewriter to write? I'm thinking they'll help my creativity.

R69 No it won’t. Why not use a quill and ink why you are at it. You are not uncreative you are just lazy and trying to cope.

Gen Z is hyping typewriters on TikTok. I want one.

I'm working on something. I have inklings so far, after weeks of jotting down ideas. The main idea didn't come to me in a flash as Harry appeared in JKR's mind in an instant. It's a grueling slog, trying to come up with something that seems to hold promise.

Every generation goes through a phase where it hypes typewriters, r71. We had a huge IBM Selectric phase here on DL about 10-15 years ago, the last time typewriters were hip and in.

My husband did. It got really popular at a bunch of schools or in friend groups and they sent him pics dressed up as the characters but then the popularity of it died that he didn't even finish the series. I loved it and keep waiting for it to catch on again. He still gets emails wanting the last book, but he says it doesn't make economic sense because one of his other series is paying the bills now. It was cute tho. A teenager in a garage band gets transported to fairy world and steals some magical instruments. Hijinks ensue.

I'm reading the Potter series and reading commentary breaking down its structure and analyzing how it's written. It's a start.

Any Newt Scamander fans? I wish she'd written novels before the movies.

The thing at R68 was incredible. Just ... Americans are fucking ignorant AF and make everything about them.

I love this. She took old scraps of paper (e.g., unused day planners, other scraps of paper to write on) and applied her mind to create a world.

We don't need another fucking Harry Potter novel.