How the world was changed by Harry Potter

Precisely quite a while back, on September 1, 1998, Educational distributed Harry Potter and the Magician's Stone, the principal US version of the UK's Harry Potter and the Scholar's Stone.

 

Since then, Harry Potter has become such an all-encompassing phenomenon that, from this vantage point, it is difficult to comprehend its full accomplishments: Publishing, fandom, children's literature, and pop culture, in general, seem to have always been the way they are today. But the world was changed by Harry Potter.

 

When J.K. Rowling first got the idea for her story while stuck on a train, she was a newly single mom; certainly, the small children's publication in the United Kingdom that ultimately took a chance on it could not have anticipated that it would have a

measurable impact on everything it touched. Harry Potter established YA book-to-movie franchises as one of pop culture's most significant forces. The publishing model for children's books was altered as a result. It also showed a whole generation that you can interact with your favorite pop culture by writing about it, working with it, creating music and art about it, and starting a business around it.

 

Here is a glance back at the way Harry Potter changed and impacted web-based being a fan, millennial culture, and the distributing business.

 

When Harry Potter came out in the United States, it became a real thing.

 

When Harry Potter first came out in the UK twenty years ago, it did well. It won a Smarties Award and had respectable sales for Bloomsbury, the publisher. However, it possibly began to move toward peculiarity levels when Academic purchased the US distribution privileges for an amazing $105,000, multiple times more than the normal unfamiliar freedoms deal at that point.

 

Arthur Levine, the Educational supervisor who gained the books, had a brilliant eye for English books that would work in the US, having proactively obtained the US privileges to Redwall and His Dull Materials. However, even he was unaware of Harry Potter's eventual expansion. He simply knew how much he enjoyed it and wanted to publish it. Barbara Marcus, president of Scholastic, "kept saying "Do you love it?" In 2002, a Scholastic spokesperson recalled, "And Arthur said yes, so we went for it." In 2007, Levine stated, "I would have been willing to go further than that if I had to."

Harry Potter received two benefits from the $105,000 sale: a substantial budget and a built-in publicity hook.

 

The press provided the hook: Articles about the small English book that had sold so many copies appeared in newspapers. The authors wanted to know which kind of book could be bought for that much money. It was a story because it was a curiosity.

 

Scholastic provided the funding. A budget is established for each book that is purchased by a publisher. The structure of that budget is such that increasing the numbers in one category results in increasing the numbers in the following category: If you're going to spend $105,000 just to buy a book, you'll also spend more on marketing, publicity, and production to have a chance of making that money back.

 

Despite the conventional wisdom of the time that children's books only made money in paperback, Scholastic invested in a lovely hardcover design for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with a soon-to-be iconic cover. It made arrangements for advertisements to appear in the appropriate newspapers and magazines and for Harry Potter to be displayed on bookstore front tables. In short, it gave the book a lot more resources than a typical debut novel from a new author typically gets, and that decision paid off.

 

Be that as it may, Educational endeavors would generally not have made a difference eventually on the off chance that individuals who got the book hadn't cherished it. That is what elevated Harry Potter from being a phenomenon that dominated childhood for a generation and brought it out of its status as a one-hit-wonder.

 

Why adults became so enamored of the Harry

Potter series

 

Adults purchase 55% of YA novels, according to a 2012 study. That boom is largely attributable to Harry Potter, a surprise crossover success that was adored by both children and adults and made it acceptable for adults to read books intended for children.

 

That's a troubling development for some critics, who claim that adults are too dull and stupid to enjoy adult literature. Be that as it may, there are a lot of purposes behind a developed individual to appreciate Harry Potter.

 

The Harry Potter series combines the intimacy and character development of a classic boarding school narrative with the scope and scope of epic fantasy and the intricate plotting of a mystery. As a result, reading at any age is pure pleasure: The fantastic mythology provides the world with scope, magic, and joy, the boarding school structure makes the characters warm, familiar, and charming, and the puzzle box mystery plotting propels the pages forward. Additionally, it profoundly affects their eventual trauma and death for all.

 

True, the best way to describe Rowling's prose is as competent and diligent; If all you want to read is perfectly crafted, well-balanced sentences, you might do better elsewhere. The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, become extremely appealing if you are an adult who can envision reading for more than one reason—the pleasures of story and the pleasure of immersing yourself in another world.

 

From the beginning, the books were very

disputable — and in numerous ways, they actually are

 

A piece of what made Harry Potter such a scholarly peculiarity is that countless children were perusing the books despite a remarkable number of endeavors to inspire them to quit perusing the books.

 

Like many fantasy works, the Harry Potter series deals with magic and witchcraft. Constant opposition from concerned conservative parents to the series' presence in school libraries and bookstores was based on the perception that the books promoted the occult. The books debuted at the top of the American Library Association's list of the year's most banned titles in 1999 and remained there for the majority of the following decade.

 

There were lawsuits filed as a result of the intense pressure to censor the series in some areas: A judge in Arkansas ordered a school district to return the books in 2003 because they were being used to promote "the religion of witchcraft." The books continue to enrage conservative religious leaders who warn of its "demonic" influence, and similar formal removal attempts continued into the second half of the decade.

 

However, the books were also accused of propagating other evils in addition to witchcraft. In 2007, after the series' end, J.K. Rowling retroactively exposed the strong wizard Dumbledore as gay. Christian scholars called the move "nonsense" after hearing the news, and queer fans were furious that Rowling had done so little to make the queer subtext of Dumbledore's character clear while he was being written (and alive). Rowling has come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons, including the denial of

characters' queer sexuality and the lack of diversity in her series.

 

The fact that many of those children grew up to be arguably even more progressive than the books they grew up reading is, in a way, a confirmation of conservatives' worst fears about the series, and all of this controversy speaks to concerns that Rowling's work would negatively influence children.

 

The publishing industry was completely transformed by Harry Potter's popularity, which also had an impact on Hollywood.

 

Two examples of how publishing was changed by Harry Potter and how that changed pop culture are as follows:

 

1)   The books enabled the publication of lengthy works intended for children. Before Harry Potter, the

 

acknowledged insight was that children didn't stand out in the range of perusing long books. Additionally, it was believed that children were not purchasing their own books. Their folks were paying for everything, and they might never want to pay an additional dollar or two for a more extended book, with its additional printing and restricting.

 

But it started to grow once Harry Potter established itself as an unstoppable cultural force and it became abundantly clear that readers would continue to purchase the books regardless of what. The series' final four volumes are all doorstoppers with well over 700 pages each.

 

Writers for children's books and publishers noticed. Between 2006 and 2016, the decade in which the Harry Potter books were at

their longest, Booklist discovered that middle-grade novels increased by 115.5 percent. They only increased by 37.37 percent from 1996 to 2006.)

 

2) Children's literature was transformed forever by Harry Potter. Children's literature was frequently regarded as an afterthought before Harry Potter. Sales were going down. Analysts would sadly observe that children were no longer reading.

 

Children's literature saw a boom in popularity following Harry Potter. Sales of non-Harry Potter children's books increased annually by 2% in 2004, during the Harry Potter craze. Since then, sales in the children's market as a whole have increased by 52% (4 percent annually). As a point of comparison, the overall book market has only increased by 33% since 2004.

 

Sure, the Harry Potter generation enjoys reading—millennials read more than any other generation—but it also established a cultural landscape in which children's books are major cultural forces and Hollywood's go-to source of inspiration. Studios look at children's bestseller lists to find properties they can use to make movies like "Harry Potter": Consequently, Divergent, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and other works. The YA book-to-movie franchise was not a cliche before Harry Potter. Because the boy wizard and his friends changed the entire industry, it is now.

 

Harry Potter is a fan likewise made ready for the mainstreaming of being a fan and nerd culture

 

Harry Potter has an enormous cultural impact: According to a

2011 survey, a third of all adults in the United States between the ages of 18 and 34 had read at least one of the books. However, the way people loved and continue to love Harry Potter is what really sets it apart.

 

First and foremost, the show made being a geek cool. Most people didn't just read the Harry Potter books by themselves; They wanted to discuss it with their friends and make new friends who also enjoyed the books. The emergence of "Web 2.0," or an increasingly social and interactive internet, coincided with this pattern. Discussion of YA, fantasy, and science fiction became commonplace as more Harry Potter fans became more active online.

 

At the beginning of the 2000s, this was still a pretty bold concept; For example, in 2003, critic A.S. Byatt's critique of "Harry Potter and the childish adult" claimed that adults "like to regress" when they read children's literature. Geek culture remained largely underground, and fantasy was primarily viewed as an immature hobby. However, it became increasingly difficult to ignore fantasy and science fiction as driving forces of culture and to dismiss fans of these genres as specialized due to the Lord of the Rings film adaptations and the growing visibility of online Harry Potter fandom. The concept of a modern, mainstream fandom uniting around a major sci-fi/fantasy series was well-established and widely accepted by the time Twilight overtook Harry Potter as the dominant young adult phenomenon in 2005.

 

Additionally, the creativity of Harry Potter fans is still felt both within and outside of the fandom. Harry Potter fan forums, archives of fanfiction and fan art, and email discussion groups exploded all over the internet in the early 2000s. Harry Potter

shows drew a great many fans, and Harry Potter cosplay turned into a notable sight at bigger nerd and comic cons.

 

At the same time, Harry Potter fans on YouTube formed a slew of music groups dedicated to personifying and singing about various characters from the books, the first of which was Harry and the Potters. This was the beginning of the "Wizard Rock" trend or shorthand for Wrock. It was later joined by another Harry Potter fan activity that was completely unique: Quidditch. The first real-world Quidditch game was created in 2005 by Middlebury College students in Vermont, which led to the development of an international college sport.

 

Various Harry Potter fans likewise proceeded to leave critical imprints on standard culture. Young Darren Criss starred as Harry Potter in the viral YouTube video A Very Potter Musical as a member of the University of Michigan theater group Starkid. His popularity led to the role of Blaine on Glee and a Broadway career.

 

John and Hank Green, now known as the Vlogbrothers, siblings who have been Harry Potter fans for a long time, started their careers on YouTube when the site was still in its infancy. However, it wasn't until Hank Green's song "Accio Deathly Hallows" went viral on the eve of the final Harry Potter book's release that they became true YouTube stars and industry success models.

 

The list goes on and on Cassandra Clare, the best-selling author of the Mortal Instruments series first became known online as Cassandra Claire, the author of the hugely popular Harry Potter fanfic The Draco Trilogy. Other Harry Potter fans, like social activist Andrew Slack and fan convention organizer Melissa Anelli, have made careers out of their love of the series. In general,

members of the Harry Potter fandom were among the first to actively apply their fandom success to their professional careers. The Harry Potter fandom made it easier for fans to market their geeky habits as professional assets, just as Harry Potter made it easier for fans to own their geeky habits.

 

The books themselves and the vast, amazing world they created are what made all of this possible—the transformation of industries and careers. The Harry Potter series is a big deal not just because it had a lot of money for publicity and marketing, though that helped, and not just because of the controversy and curiosity that surrounded it. The Harry Potter series is a big deal because it introduces the world to a huge, magical world that millions of people have always wanted to escape into. It also tells a story that millions of people loved.