I was contacted yesterday by a reporter at the New York Times and asked “whether or not fans will embrace a play that she co-authored but did not write entirely on her own.” She called this morning and we spoke for about half an hour.
I’ll be talking about this and other subjects this Sunday at Oklahoma City’s largest bookstore’s Midnight Madness Potter Party. I share here the gist of what I said to the Times reporter and a shade of what I’ll talk about at the Party. It is the first of several Posts this week by your friends here at HogwartsProfessor about what to expect in the draft script. Stay tuned!
To the reporter’s question, there isn’t any doubt about fan response to the script marketed as the “Eighth Harry Potter” story. Harry Potter fandom and readers have already embraced ‘Cursed Child.’ It has approached records for pre-publication orders, records that were set, of course, nine years ago when the series finale was released. That the story is not hers and that the script was drafted in much the form it is now in, i.e., that she acted as an editor or at best a contributor but not as author per se, means very little to her millions of fans.
It’s better, though, to think of them as Harry’s fans, not J. K. Rowling’s, however much they hang on her twitter blasts and PotterMore posts. Sales of Rowling’s non-Hogwarts books, Casual Vacancy and the three Cormoran Strike mysteries, would be considered very impressive from other writers, especially within the genres she’s chosen, but have never begun to approach Harry Potter sales figures.
There’s something about Harry Potter which causes the excitement about the ‘Eighth Book.’ I’ll go out on a limb, though, and suggest there is going to be significant disappointment among even the most ardent Potter fans about this Midnight Madness experience around ‘Cursed Child.’ Let’s be clear about five things ‘Cursed Child’ is not: [Read more…]
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