DangerDad really disliked Harry Potter, and he’ll tell you about it at length if allowed.
I have complaints about some elements of the stories–I really hate the Dursleys and think she was trying and failing to emulate Roald Dahl–but always read and enjoy them. I haven’t bought them, though; they’re not that good.
I like the books fine, but I’m fairly easy to please. Plus, I have a new found love of children’s books and I really enjoy somewhat mindless escapism reading. Still, I’d like to know if there are any theories on how hype happens? How do particular items explode into fame and fortune, while others may be better, but receive much less attention? Is it word of mouth combined with spectacular marketing? Is it the magical alignment of the planets? The butterfly effect? What makes Harry Potter, Titanic, Tickle-Me-Elmo and high-powered scooters reach such levels of stardom? 
Mostly just luck. Phenomena happen every couple of years, because the public and the media seem to gravitate towards creating them. In the past fifteen years there have been such things as:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Goosebumps, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Tickle-Me-Elmo, Trading Cards, Pokemon, several others I can’t recall, and now Harry Potter - which has defied the trend by managing to still be the same phenomenon for about five years running.
What it is seems not to matter. In terms of quality they are often quit questionable, but in terms of marketability they have a clear angle that can be simple but easily exploitable.
That’s my uneducated take on it.
As the OP points out, it wasn’t until the third book that the Harry Potter series started attracting a lot of mainstream attention. By the time book four came out pretty much everyone not living in a cave must have heard about the series. Aside from the books themselves, the first movie was also in the works by then, and with that came all kinds of commercial tie-ins. So I’d say that from about the third book on we can credit “spectacular marketing” with much of it, just as for the other super-popular stuff you mentioned.
But the first Harry Potter book wasn’t promoted any more than one would expect from a YA fantasy novel by a promising new author. I don’t think the second book got much more publicity. They sold very well, though. Well enough to indicate there was real money to be made if the series continued and was given enough exposure, so the publishers and film studio and all those business types saw to it that they got enough exposure.
The only references I’d heard to the books before the third one was that they were selling unusually well due to attracting both kids who weren’t normally into recreational reading and adults who weren’t normally into “kiddie fare”. Word of mouth seems the likely explanation for this. But why Harry Potter instead of some other series that might be considered better? Well, maybe those books that are “better” are too challenging for kids that aren’t much into reading. In terms of quality, I think Rowling managed to luck into a “sweet spot” between being too complex or sophisticated to appeal to the cartoon-watching masses and too bland or predictable to interest those that were already discriminating readers. She was smart enough to choose a setting (school!) instantly familiar to kids and former kids throughout most of the world but also make it seem fun and exciting. No book is going to appeal to everyone, but she seems to have managed a series that, for at least the first three books, appeals to about as wide an audience as one could hope for. So between that and the later marketing, any future books would have to be pretty terrible to lose much ground.
When all the hype began, I picked one up off the shelf at the bookstore and began to browse. The first sentence my eye lit upon was “‘Open!’, he hissed.” I promptly put it back, and have never read one since. Any author with that lack of knowledge or respect of her craft doesn’t deserve to be read.
For the record, I love Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogies: now they can WRITE.
Haha, that sentence is so hilarious and awful.
Isn’t it, though? I remember P G Wodehouse riffing on something similar in one of his books, something along the lines of “Insofar as a word without any sibilants was capable of being hissed, he hissed it.”
Damn it, “'Open”, he snarled!"; '“Open!”, he grated" - this is a sentence which DOES need an adverb or two: '“Open!”, he grated, quietly but angrily."
I haven’t read any Harry Potter. It’s children’s literature. I’m sure I would have devored them if they had been written thirty years ago. But there’s plenty of books I can read before having to read kids books.
I haven’t seen any of the films either.
I read the first three and disliked them enough that I packed 'em up and sent 'em to a fellow doper who wanted 'em. Given that I have about a gazillion books and rarely hate one bad enough to actually get rid of it, you can tell how I fell about the series.
Overall, I thought it was simplistic and boring. I thought the characters were annoying, and that constant “oh look, we’re kids, and we’re getting away with being BAD because eventually we’ll SAVE the UNIVERSE” thing doesn’t go over well with me at all. I dearly love children’s books, but these just weren’t up to par.
LOTR and Narnia and Madeleine L’Engle all have a thread in their books of children (or hobbits, if you will) reaching above themselves and doing the right thing, even in difficult circumstances. The battle between Good and Evil is never portrayed as easy, and there’s a fair amount of real fear, uncertainty, and pain in each book. I saw none of this in Harry Potter - instead, I saw a bunch of brats breaking the rules for their own gains who happen to save the universe while they were tricking the adults. Yuk.
I’ve read excerpts and the first 10-15 pages or so of the first one and walked away from each experience thinking “Really?” There’s just no there there, for me. “‘Open!’ he hissed,” was one of the things I lit upon too, and I remember wondering where in hell the woman’s editor was. (That’s really glaring. There is no way that should’ve ever been permitted to get to press.) I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre in general, but HP, IME, isn’t simply uninteresting or unenjoyable, it’s unreadable. If I’m going to enjoy fantasy, then it needs to have, well, fantasy. Take me to a world that’s unlike anything I might actually encounter in any way. Go big or go home. JK doesn’t know where big lives.
That’s the part that peeves me the most about the whole HP phenomenon, the kids that were so deeply enthralled and read hundreds of pages in one sitting aren’t, in the instances I’ve seen, kids who are sitting and reading tens of pages of anything else, at all. They read the HP books over and over and over again. That’s not expanding anything but JK Rowling’s pockets.
I’d dump a book with that sentence. 
After I started noticing the adverbs in dialogue in the Potter books, I began looking for them elsewhere, and found very few (she said, thankfully)
I think adverbs in dialogue are a sign lazy writing. Shouldn’t we know from what went before that the speaker is angry?
In defense of “Open”, he hissed – Harry speaks Snake. Maybe that’s what Rowling was conveying there.
I’m a big Harry Potter fan, but I can’t stand the movies either and only see them because they have great cameos and big parts for cool British actors/actresses (John Hurt and Emma Thompson for example). 
Hmm…I meant “bit” parts.
I feel I should say something in defense of “Open!”, he hissed." I’m not saying it’s great writing, but I’m not so sure it’s entirely implausible. I understand the argument that you can’t hiss a word that doesn’t have sibilants in it, but when you whisper you aren’t vibrating your vocal folds in the same way as when you speak normally. This means that you usually sustain the sound on a sort of “h” sound. I think the sibilance of the “h” is particulary noticable when whispering angrily or with extra energy.
I would say that the verb “to hiss” is a fairly accurate description of an energetic whisper. It would be nice to have an “s” or two in there, but it’s not a requirement for hissing.
Having said that, I don’t remember the context for the “Open!”, he hissed" line so maybe it is obvious that he is not whispering or anything like that.
Yes, that’s exactly right. Harry is speaking the word “open” to open the Chamber of Secrets, but he’s speaking it in Parseltongue, not English. Every word in Parseltongue is hissed.
Total agreement. Rowling needs a good editor to help her focus.
I’ve read all five books and I think each one has been betterly (sic) written. The first two seemed almost a string of short stories with vague connections, and the last three, I think, have only grown in complexity. Rowling’s style is rather simple, but her books are supposed to be for children. The first two movies I thought were rather boring. Why see a movie that is an exact copy of the book? “Azkaban”, however, was very good.
On preview, it’s the plotting that has gotten smoother, I think, in the later books. The first two books had a mini-adventure per chapter that was supposed to move the story along, with an occasional gee-whiz wizardy trick thrown-in. The later books are quite as choppy.
I suspect, although I have no proof, that it’s the publishers who have decided to skimp on the editing in order to get the books on the shelves faster.
I’m apathetic about Harry Potter. My wife, however, is an administrator on a HP RPG. She is a walking encyclopedia on it, but she keeps it to herself. I wouldn’t have seen the movies if not for her, and I enjoyed them for what they were. But that’s where it ends. I haven’t read the books and have no plans to.
I was introduced to the Harry Potter series by a friend who is deeply involved in the books, and who seemed to assume that since she often saw me reading books, I ought to like them too. She even went so far as to buy me a copy of the first volume so that we could discuss the minutiae during lunch. However, we have moved past this incident and are still friends.
I don’t know quite what it is about the books that rubs me the wrong way; yes, they are not the greatest literature in the universe, but my own standards of reading enjoyment are all over the place, so that’s not an automatic deal-breaker. Part of it, I suspect, is the fact that I was exposed to the marketing hype long before I actually read any of the books, and I tend to react more critically to things that I’m told I absolutely will love.
I find it difficult to identify with Harry, and that may be the key to why I don’t find the books appealing. It seems to me that the stories are not simply written for children, but are written specifically as a child’s rather embarrassingly self-centered wish-fulfillment fantasy. Harry is whisked away from his cartoonishly uncaring, inattentive family to a world in which he not only has magic powers, but in fact is uniquely important and famous even among wizards. Harry not only is especially gifted at magic, but turns out to be a natural at sports as well. Harry has miraculously inherited a fortune from his famous wizard parents. Adults who believe in Harry are kindly and wise; adults who doubt or question Harry are unreasonably petty and shortsighted, or downright evil. At least, this is how the stories impressed me in general.
I think that I would have found the books somewhat more engaging if they had been less insistent in promoting Harry’s messianic status among his peers, and more about him gradually discovering the wonders of Rowling’s undeniably fascinating shadow society of wizards. As it is, I found the constant emphasis on Harry’s exalted status off-putting. If he’s supposed to be the scion of such well-regarded, talented and wealthy parents, and has been famous since birth in the wizarding community, then the fact that he has been allowed to grow up in the care of such abusive relatives really does defy belief, unless the goal was to create a wizard with a craving for power and an undying hatred of nonmagical types.
On the other hand, I have to grudgingly give some credit to the series for indirectly inspiring the clever and amusing end credit sequence from Prisoner of Azkaban. Wasn’t that a hoot? I liked the Lupin footieprints especially.