Why did Harry Potter become so popular?

[KindergartenKop]

I'm not a huge fan personally, but I think they're quite well written. I'm not sure they deserve all the hype though. So why did they become so popular?

it sort of had it all really...funny bits, pathos, a bit scarey, teen romance and teen issues, depiction of happy family life, properly serious sad bits, strong women and geeky types who were not bullied or laughed at, great food descriptions and a solid mixture of reality and magic...oh and the bullied abandoned child who turns out to be a hero and the triumph of good over evil but not without effort and sacrifice.

@Beamur

My SC were the perfect age when the books started being published. They were so so excited when a new one was coming. They are just brilliant kids books, imaginative, magical, relatable. Kids wanted to go to Hogwarts! My DD read them a few years later and hoped so much to get a letter 😁 I enjoyed them too, it's clever, thoughtful plotting and fab characters. Very little else has come close. The books were hugely popular way before the films were made. I think it's the other way round, the films were successful because of the loyalty of the readers.

I think they were also successful because they were, so far as they could be, an accurate depiction of the books. I read them and watched the films as a middle aged adult and I can still remember seeing the hall at Hogwarts with all the candles floating in mid air!

@Icantreachthepretzels
Oh wow, can I have a link please? That sounds brilliant! I only ever read the last two Mallory Towers books, but I did enjoy them as a kid.

I love Harry Potter, I found the stories so exciting, and was already into magic before I read them because of The Worst Witch and The Belfry Witches. Some things were a bit spooky too (the scene in the graveyard when Voldemort comes back was chilling.) I love the characters still, Snape will always have a soft spot in my heart.

I just loved the characters so much. I grew up with those characters.

I do NOT get the Snape love however; this was a man perfectly willing to have a baby killed, only regretting it when he realised said baby was the woman he was in love with stalking. He was also abusive to his students, including very vulnerable ones like Neville.

It really worked for parents too - children's books often have a second or later coming when their original readers introduce them to their own kids. It worked for parents who had grown up on Blyton, Dahl, Jennings, Lewis and others

I think it was also a bit Cool Britannia. The Wizarding World was very trad British - steam engines and boarding schools and lower orders and aristocrats and boys called Harry and Ron and George and Fred. And here it was being presented in a way that was cool. A bit Blyton, a bit Bond, a bit Roy of the Rovers ...

The first four books were excellent. The characters were likeable and relatable; the plots were engaging, exciting, and real page-turners. I read them as an adult and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

The problems started with Order of the Phoenix which was too long and contained far too much digression & waffle. The main plot got lost in endless background exposition and the new minor characters served little purpose. The reasons for this are obvious : Rowling was by this stage so successful that she was able to overrule her editors & publishers. The final three books would all have been far better if they were at least 100 pages shorter.

That seems to be common with quite a few writers, @Libertaire. They have some major success and then seem to think they no longer need the assistance of an editor. Ego.

IIMO, that they were written without the usual prose of fantasy books partially lead to there success.

The plot lines are good and the character development OK.

But the story type isn't particularly original but the stereotypical British feel of it was somewhat enchanting.

And the less said about how infuriating it was that harry got away with everything the better.

@Libertaire

The first four books were excellent. The characters were likeable and relatable; the plots were engaging, exciting, and real page-turners. I read them as an adult and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

The problems started with Order of the Phoenix which was too long and contained far too much digression & waffle. The main plot got lost in endless background exposition and the new minor characters served little purpose. The reasons for this are obvious : Rowling was by this stage so successful that she was able to overrule her editors & publishers. The final three books would all have been far better if they were at least 100 pages shorter.

No, not overrule. What happens is that editors become frightened of editing books by famous beat selling authors.

It's not the authors' fault; it's their publishers'.

I've only recently read the first few Harry Potter books. I only read them to see what all the fuss was about. Found them ok but was still unsure what the fuss was about. I then watched the films and thought they were awesome! Most of the time a movie never lives up to a book for me, but for me Harry Potter was the other way around!

I was 16 when the first one was published so just the "wrong" age. I got into them when I was 20 when the first film came out, and read the four published books in 3 days over Christmas. I then had 3 "Harry Potter Days" of getting my new ones delivered on the release date and devouring them in one day. And I've re-read them so many times and now going through the joy of reading them to DS (8) He's not a keen reader himself, but he's loving them. My voice is a bit stretched tonight after doing Dobby and Winky voices in the Hogwarts kitchen

I love the construction and development of the plot, the foreshaddowing. Everything is beautifully explained and rich in detail. The muggle world is grounded and pretty timeless and the parallel wizarding world is credible. They cover the everlasting human themes of love and death (still keeping Shakespeare going), good and evil with all the shades in between. The characters are credible and very human with flaws (and also easy to do different voices for ) They can be read on many levels and benefit from re-reading for depth. They develop with the reader and a child reading them as they were published will have grown with Harry. The first story is a relatively light children's bording school story and the later books are far darker and heavier. You laugh with the characters and cry with them too.

My criticism is that the sentence construction can be a bit long which can be tricky when reading aloud, but that's pretty minor and I don't notice when reading in my head.

I'm a fantasy fan anyway and have been regularly checking wardrobes since reading Narnia from 7, but the Harry Potters are up there as one of my favourites for fun comfort reading.

I disagree with many on here, I think compared to many children's authors she writes very well (I know she's a more dated author but recently I've been reading DD the Helen Caswell books, and whilst the plots are enjoyable enough, they really are badly written!) JKs books are also fast paced and more engaging (for many children) than say Philip Pullman whose books tend to be more boring convoluted and not as visual. Books though are very personal so if you don't get the appeal of them op it's because it's not your thing (not meant in a snarky way; DH doesn't get them either, just as I really can't get into the books DH likes (he's the Philip Pullman fan!))
They are also great for dyslexic children due to the visual content, lack of endless description and not overly wordy.
They were also very popular long before the films. I remember I was doing my finals at uni (1997) when I got a copy of HP and I loved it as it took me away from the endless revision of the Roman Empire well sort of, as I have said there are a lot of classical references peppered throughout her books

The books were definitely extremely popular before the film's came out. I remember I first became aware of them in mid-2000 when I was working in London for the first time and everyone on the train seemed to be reading them so I got a copy of the Philosopher's Stone. Even though I was early 20s by them I really enjoyed them and bought the next two. Goblet of Fire was published shortly after and I pre-ordered a hard copy because I was so keen to read it! I remember there was a lot of hype about the release and people were queuing at Waterstones at midnight. The first film wasn't released until over a year later.

Nostalgia. A magical world layered on top of our own. Children's books that weren't sans all danger and complexity.

I too think they are kind of derivative also trashy and not very well written. However, they are also engrossing and kind of have a lovely appeal with themes of friendship happy school days and adventure. I much prefer his dark materials though and read them both when younger.

@SapphireSeptember -DM'd you the link

@SylvanasWindrunner

I was 11 when the first one came out and I devoured it. I was a voracious reader and read 'up' a lot, but the world-building and escapism of Harry Potter was beyond anything I had read before. I was actually reluctant to read it at first as it didn't sound like the kind of thing I enjoyed, but a neighbour bought it for me as a gift and my mum said I should give it a whirl. She regretted that when I was haranguing her to pre-order the new releases I remember meeting JK Rowling twice at successive Edinburgh Book Fairs to have my book signed, and there were so many excited kids there.

I still read them from time to time now - now they are comfortable and familiar. Looking forward to introducing them to DD when she is old enough.

This Only this was my eldest child. I had 4 and we all loved them. It became a huge part of our lives, waiting for the next book or film. To this day we all go to the studio tour and now I have grandsons!

The books really were NOT low key before the movies, to the PP who said that!

I was working in bookshops when they came out and the first one was pretty massive from fairly early on and the second was huge from day 1.

They are great stories. Absolute page turners and accessible to a very wide readership.

By the end she really could have done with a stricter editor or better planning to break the series down into more volumes - the size of the last couple were crazy, but it didn't put the readers off so who am I to judge.

Also agree that the books were huge well before film. I had a colleague at the time who used to do the whole queuing outside a bookshop at midnight to get a new release and then sit up all night to read it. She was in her late 20s at the time.

Because the stories are brilliant. Perhaps people who were already adults with plenty of literary experience when the first book came out are less likely to agree, but if you were a child, well ...!

Those who lived it will know what I mean.

I think there were many books I had really enjoyed during the first 9 years of my life, but when I was gifted a paperback copy of Philosopher's Stone, I found something inside it that I hadn't ever experienced before. I don't have the perfect word for what that was, and I'm cringing at the thought of writing this next bit, but the best way I can describe it is as if magic was happening inside my head - like my imagination was firing off in all directions and I could picture every single scene with absolute clarity. In fact, I believed in Hogwarts so completely that even after I turned 11, I had a secret hope that my letter would arrive by owl and I wouldn't have to go to the boring Muggle secondary school I had been signed up for.

Thankfully, I grew out of that, but I've never grown out of Potter. He grew up with me. And I revisit him maybe once or twice a year, and I never get tired of it, because for some reason I can still feel the magic even now.

No other book or series of books - even those I have really, really loved - has ever managed to leave quite the same impression.

@Icantreachthepretzels

Thank you!

I blame Order of the Phoenix, although I liked Snape before that (and had a crush on him when I was 14. ) OotP came out when I was going through my own struggles, and I related to the teenage Snape so badly it hurt. (I also discovered Evanescence around the same time as this, I was such an angsty teenage Goth, now I'm an angsty adult Goth. )

Disagree. They’re not well written. Quite sloppy, actually.

Original, imaginative, captivating, intelligent, inspiring? Yes.

@CareerConcerns1999

Because they got picked up and turned into a movie. The books were low key before the movie. Movie one dropped and boom suddenly everyone wanted to read the books.

There was a long long gap between book 4 and 5, and then subsequent ones. This also creates a hype.

They were huge before the movies came out. I stood in line at midnight for the releases of books 3 and 4, both of which came out before the first movie in 2001. My parents actually bought 4 copies of Triwizard Tournament in 2000 because me, my sister and both of them all wanted to read it right away and not get spoilers.

As well as boarding school books, they're also very like mystery books — especially the earlier ones. And I would think that PoA might have the first massive twist a child reads and remembers.