Alternative title: WILL there ever be another book series phenomenon like Harry Potter?
To qualify the series would have to be massively read and enjoyed by ALL ages, from kids to adults. The series would have to be so popular you could strike up a conversation about it with a random person. I loved/love that communal experience of reading where SO many people knew the references, characters, jokes, plot points. My 50 year old brother-in-law and my 8 year old can both tell me what House they’d be in. There hasn’t been a book or series even close to that level of popularity since. Will there ever be again?
EDIT: Loved reading these really smart and thought-provoking analyses here. Opinion seems to be divided. The book series that get the most votes for being a Harry Potter-like phenomenon are GOT, Hunger Games, Twilight, LOTR, and 50 Shades of Gray. I personally think LOTR is the closest parallel for a series with incredible staying power and ear worm world-building. I think it is a little more of a niche passion though.
by Bookanista
33 Comments
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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Was there anything comparable that came before it?
Working on it right now, I’ll come back here in 5-10 years
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?”
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.
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”
I think that huge book successes like Harry Potter are really rare. Most authors are barely making a living, if at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Burned out. The HP series took several years to complete, and the hype was constant.
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.
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.
Give it a little time. HP1 came out in 1997. Star Wars came out in 1977. We’re probably overdue for some new phenomenon.
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.
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.
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 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?’
Harry Potter and the Mid-life Crisis.
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.
Harry Potter is the gold standard for YA fantasy novels. Pigs will fly before another series overtakes it.
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’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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Game of thrones would’ve been like that if the books had actually been finished