Harry Potter and the Great Mystery of Publishing

So... Now I've read all 7 Harry Potter books and seen all 5 movies... Plus, I decided to go back and re-read the entire series, now that I know the -- shall we say, punchline and see how/if everything fits together now... All this, as I begin the horrible, soul-crushing process of trying to procure a literary agent for my own work. In fact I got my very first form rejection yesterday... Yay me! I'm officially an author in seek of representation -- my novel is no longer just clogging up my hard drive.

But I digress...

My point is, on this second read-through of the amazingly overhyped adventures of the boy wizard, I'm noticing more things... I mean, I own the damn books, so I obviously enjoyed reading them, thought they were a cute little story that had a bunch of universal themes/morals without being preachy. They're great little books (not so little, lately), no one is disputing that. I also think they're fairly well-written, without any pretention at being what they're not, and I am enjoying my second read-through... BUT, now that I'm paying more attention to the detail of craft and language, the truth is the Harry Potter books are peppered with cliches and the prose is at times a bit on the clunky side (sometimes, more than just a bit). I'm not saying they're badly written -- they're not... I'm just saying they're not stellar, either. And yet, look at what's become of them:

Breaking sales records world-wide, making more money that a book's ever made before and, basically, creating an unbelievable hype.

So, again I ask: how the hell did J.K. Rowling get away with this?

A first-time author with no writing credits. A single mum on welfare. Somehow she got an agent and somehow that agent sold her book to what at the time was a small publishing house (I wonder where they both are now -- Bloomsbury Publishing and Christopher Little Literary Agency... I mean, aside from sitting next to their indoor pools, enjoying the millions they've made on Rowling's series...) And, the word count for the first book was apparently HUGE for books for the wee folk.

So, again I ask: how did this happen?

Luck? Talent? Perseverance? A case of reaching the right people at the right time?

I truly think it must have been pretty much the latter... And that's all any aspiring author can really hope for. Agents keep saying in blogs, interviews, articles and their agencies' websites, that they're looking for 'stellar writing' and for 'certain' things in the first sample pages sent with a query -- such as action, the introduction of the main character and not a hell of a lot of backstory, for example... Then you go to the closest bookstore and start reading the first pages of the latest best-sellers (by both debut and established authors), and what do you find? Backstory. Main character not introduced until Chapter Two. Exposition. Over-writing. All of the above.

Of course, this is not always the case, but there is a lot out there that starts out like that.

Take Kostova's The Historian, from my previous post: the first page of the book (NOT her prologue), is a lot of exposition and backstory. No scenes, no action, no real sense of setting. And yet, an agent (statistically, likely more than one) asked for a partial (and then a full and then offered representation, but that's not the point I want to make today).

Now, there's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: the first couple of pages introduce the Dursleys, who are not even real nemeses of Harry's. In fact, we do not even hear about Harry until page 4 (and that's a very incidental mention) and we don't see the little guy until the next chapter.

Still, at least one agent asked to see the partial and then the full.

So, once more with feeling: how the hell did this happen?

Answer: The right person just happened to see Rowling's query at the right time. That's all. Hell, if he'd seen her query on another day, when he was perhaps in a different mood or had more to do, his answer might have been different altogether (i.e. a 'sadly, this is not right for us' form response) Perhaps she would've found another agent. Perhaps not, and these days we wouldn't be experiencing the greatest literary marketing phenomenon of all time.

I'm not going to delve into another rant about the great marketing machine behind Harry Potter... That is what it is: a cutesy little book, a cool idea and fair (NOT stellar) writing pushed to superstar status by genius PR.

Today's rant is about the first steps. The first queries, the first pages, the first form rejections, the first requests for partials and then fulls...

Everyone on the shelves today -- from J.K. Rowling, to Dan Brown, to Norah Roberts, to Arthur Golden and Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje (sp???), had to start out somewhere. And, let's face it, of all of the above, only Ondaatje has veritably STELLAR writing... no one understands what the hell he's writing about, but he has beautiful use of language and high metaphor. Of course, this means that he doesn't sell as much as Dan Brown and Norah Roberts, who's language use is geared pretty much to the lowest common denominator, but that, again, belongs in a different rant...

The point is all these people had to query different agents and swallow rejection letters until someone had a good day and 'got them'.

It's a subjective business and there's no way around that. One agent's great find will be buried in another's slush pile. That same agent who said no today (maybe because she's looking for southern fiction right now), might say yes to the same project several months later, when she's in fact more actively looking for chick-lit or whatever.

As for me, I plan to keep querying until the right agent 'gets me' and is as excited about my book as I am. I know it's a good read. I know there's a market niche for it. And I know the setting, theme and characters all have traits that set this apart from other works in the genre. So I guess it's just a matter of time, heartbreak and patience. And perseverance.

And I'm going to keep every rejection letter and email I get, so that when my novel is an international best-seller, I can send signed copies of it to every agent that rejects me now, enclosing a copy of my original query and their form responses to it -- not in a mean way... Just as a gentle reminder that every day, because they're so overworked and overstressed, they might be missing out on something good.