Who Will Be The Next Rowling?

So here's what I've been doing today (besides laundry, groceries, and the usual Sunday whirl) -- writing a "Mind Meld" piece for SF Signal, writing a review for ComicMix, writing my usual Monday "Reviewing the Mail" post, and writing two reviews that will go up here later Monday and on Tuesday morning. What I neglected to do: write anything to post today. Instead, we dip into the vaults.

The title question came up in a rec.arts.sf.written thread in mid-May 2008, and these are my various responses to different sides of that discussion, utterly devoid of context and probably less interesting than I think they are:

1: The Pessimistic View
I suspect anyone wanting to get a sample of Rowling's future career would be well-served to take a look at the work of Sue Townsend, author of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4.

(Townsend's book didn't become a series until a few years later, and wasn't popular on the ultramassive Potter level -- what has been? -- but otherwise it's pretty similar.)

2: Answering the musical question, "Why not Lloyd Alexander?"
The fact that he wrote forty years earlier in a different country might have had a bit to do with it. The parents of the kids buying Rowling's books weren't all born yet.

If we're going to question why every vaguely similar previous writer wasn't as successful as Rowling; we'd be here forever -- the point of Rowling is that no one similar was previously anywhere near her level of success.

3: And what of R.L. Stine?
That's a decent comparison within kid's books -- Stine sold boxcar-loads of books for a long time -- but not as good within books in general.

Rowling was one of those writers who seemed to create an entire genre behind her, because she was so immensely popular. (She didn't actually create a genre, just like Grisham didn't actually create the idea of a legal thriller, but there was a lot more of the kind of books they wrote
after them than there were before.)

Stine was really the next Sweet Valley High (mixed with Garbage Pail Kids, I guess.) Gossip Girl is the current holder of that throne.

4: No one ever sold as well as Rowling!
"She's the John Grisham of kid's books" would be roughly the publishing received wisdom from about 1998-99.

The next Rowling was Dan Brown.

Meyer is, at best, the one after that.

(The common thread is that they all came out of nowhere, wrote books that looked like they would be only mildly popular, and suddenly struck a nerve with a vast audience.)

5: Tolkien's outsold Rowling now, but how well did he do out of the gate?
That's true, but it has more to do with the increasing efficiency of the modern marketing/media/retailing engine than with the particulars of individual books.

It's the same mechanism that has made opening weekends the primary measure of a movie's importance these days -- the biggest media events are much larger, and much more front-loaded, than they used to be.

I expect there will be another writer -- someone we've never heard of now -- who starts writing in some previously neglected sub-genre in the next five years, catches on hugely, and has outsold Rowling by 2020.