In honor of the final film premiering stateside this week, I felt this would make a good topic for discussion. The title of today’s post might imply some sort of animosity (or at least spiritual ennui) toward Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling’s latest project - Pottermore. No, it’s actually a whole lot simpler than that. It’s that the traffic to the as-yet-unopened website is so intense, despite the fact that all you can currently do is submit your email address to express interest and receive updates, that you cannot actually submit your email address to express interest and receive updates. I know, because I spent the better part of a day trying.
Shutup. It wasn’t the only thing I did. And, I did eventually get on.
Anyway, that bodes well for the business model of Pottermore, whatever that may end up being, but doesn’t seem very promising for those of us hoping to access it in its first few weeks (it goes live in October, with a limited number of beta-testers gaining access on July 31, the birthday of the titular [heh heh] hero). The intense interest in the project is pretty interesting as well, particularly since Rowling and her publishers have been adamant that, whatever will come of this website, no new Potter books will be forthcoming. Pottermore will apparently be an online store where Potter e-books will be sold exclusively, with some new material written about the Potterverse, and several online games and interactive content. That last part kind of sounds kinda like sanctioned fan fiction, but one can hope that is not what’s intended.
The geek in me enjoyed Harry Potter far more than is reasonable for what, at the end of the day, was just a well-written but fairly simple book series. Arguably, it sparked the most recent revival of the supernatural genre novels, for which we can ply Rowling with both great thanks (i.e., for The Dresden Files) and lamentation (i.e., for the Twilight series). I’m sure those other authors would argue that Rowling’s writing didn’t influence theirs overly much, and they are probably telling the truth. The authors that have been most obviously influenced by Rowling are relegated to young adult fiction, if they’ve been published at all, and have mostly produced derivative crap in an obvious attempt to write “the NEXT Harry Potter.”
No, most of the recently released supernatural fiction, good and bad, is not directly influenced by Rowling’s writing (though they may share common influences). What the Potter books did for these other books was prime the fantasy pump for a large segment of the reading population that probably wouldn’t have given other fantasy/urban fantasy/supernatural genre stuff a chance. The increase in popularity in turn created a fresh wave of such novels from opportunistic writers (not a criticism - if I put that much effort into something I’d want to get paid too). That increase in inventory in turn created more interest, and the circle of life continues.
So, Potter created some opportunity for other writers, and made Rowling ludicrously rich in the process. And now, she’d like to “give something back” to her fans and readers, and we’d love to let her. If she happens to get paid a little more in the process (especially since she’s bypassing the Kindle and Nook stores to sell the hottest commodity in ebooks directly), one can hardly blame her. I for one am willing to admit my curiosity toward the new site. In the meantime, we have the final movie to watch and dissect. Its stateside release will be this Friday (or late Thursday night depending on how you view such things). I hear they gave the movie a twist ending - Voldemort is actually Harry’s father. No wait, that was something else...
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