I’ll save the big news for a press release, but the minor news is worth a post: over the weekend, I finally decided on a title for my series of educational graphic novels featuring two predators that get in each other’s way.
The title will be Code of the Wild, and the first book in the series will be fully titled Code of the Wild: Timber Wolves vs. Wolverines. We’ll follow up with some similar titles, all to be announced as soon as the cover artwork is finished and the company’s financials are fully worked out.
Exciting, huh? I thought so. And don’t think I’ve given up on my other pet project, Minus World… I’ll share more when I’m ready to announce something, but things are looking very good on the MW front…
An article in the Washington Post today reminded me about something I’d come to realize about a year ago when the seventh Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was about to be released. In the publishing world, the release of the last four Harry Potter books has been a major event, with each book generating more buzz and hype than the last. Every publisher out there would kill to have even a tenth of Harry Potter’s popularity, and many publishers have released “me too!” products that are meant to do just that.
For example, Scholastic is publishing a series that was originally called Children of the Red King in the UK that’s been repositioned to become the Charlie Bone here in the United States. The covers and logo look very similar to those found on the US Harry Potter books. Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials wasn’t on the radar of many readers until Scholastic Point brought the series over from the UK, renamed the first book The Golden Compass, and positioned the series as “the series that’s even more popular than Harry Potter in Britain right now.” Never mind that His Dark Materials is closer to The Chronicles of Narnia than it is to Harry Potter; The Chronicles of Narnia doesn’t get the headlines that Harry Potter gets.But the question that came to mind for me last summer was this: who made Harry Potter popular in the first place?
Originally, the pitch was that Harry Potter was something that children had discovered and begun devouring, much to the surprise of their parents. I remember reading articles in Time and Newsweek around the time the fourth book was released that talked about how children were suddenly reading again, thanks to Harry Potter. And what’s interesting is that while children certainly were reading Harry Potter, it was because adults were reading it too. Read more »
Journal | SeanJJordan | 
May 5, 2008 4:12 pm | 
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