When J.K. Rowling wrote the words, “This boy will be famous. There won’t be a child in our world who doesn’t know his name”, she had no idea how accurate that prediction would prove to be in real life. (Rowling is a much better Seer than Professor Trelawney, if you ask me.) With more than 450 million copies sold, Harry became an equivalent of a celebrity here in the Muggle world. The massive success of the books, nevertheless, don’t strike us Potterheads as a mystery because it bears an obvious truth: everything about Harry Potter is absolutely fantastic. We thereby hardly ever stop and consider how a made-up world could have driven countless people to wait 6+ hours on release day.

However, a few weeks back, when I learned that Fifty Shades of Grey’s sales records had surpassed Harry Potter’s, I first did a double take and then took a moment to contemplate on the successes of both series. It came to me rather quickly why the Fifty Shades of Grey was able to “make it”:  lust. Even Jo Rowling joked in an interview, “Just think how many books I could’ve sold if Harry had been a bit more creative with his wand.”

I will confess how strangely uncomfortable it felt to see a book that started out as a fanfiction for Twilight outsell Rowling’s 17 years of work. And soon that uneasiness triggered my defensive outpourings: Well, unlike E.L. James, Jo had seeded the love for reading in millions of children! Jo had created a whole new world! Jo had… (you name it, I probably said it)

Inadvertently or not, I had made myself the leader of Rowling’s Army! My efforts in the apologetics of Harry Potter, in retrospect, makes me laugh though. It does not matter whether or not Rowling continues to hold a better title than the next author. What matters is how she captivated us with her words, pulled us into the world she had created, and somehow made it all believable.

So how did she do it?

Logic
Even in a completely imaginary world, Rowling valued logic. It gives a realistic perspective in a fantasy-fiction. Before she set what magic could do, she outlined the limits of it. For instance, magic could not create food or revive the dead entirely. Then she connected magic in terms of science (more or less): Charms would be adding properties to something while Transfiguration would mean changing its nature totally – “the molecular structure alters [for Transfiguration]…”

“To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I’ll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic.”

Details
She gave readers the confidence that she knew absolutely every little detail about her world. From the start, she wrote out all the backstories of characters, even ones who weren’t that crucial to the story. One important backstory was revealed on Pottermore – McGonagall was said to have had an affair with a Muggle. Rowling said she had known McGonagall’s past as well as all the death eater’s all along but did not include them in the books because they were irrelevant details.

“It was five years from the train journey, where I had the original idea, to finishing the book. And during those five years this massive material was generated — some of which will never find its way into the book, will never need to be in the book. It’s just stuff I need to know for my own pleasure — partly for my own pleasure and partly because, I like reading a book where I have the sense that the author knows everything. They might not be telling me everything, but you have that confidence that the author really knows everything.”

Characters
It was uncommon for a children’s novel to have characters who grow up and mature over time. Usually, the characters were stuck in a time-frame and they just went on different adventures in every book (ie. Magic Tree house). Harry Potter completely uprooted that concept. The characters in the books went through the same internal conflicts we do as we pass through adolescence. And in a way, that allowed us to grow up with them. Also, there were plenty of characters to relate to. I mean, we’ve all known at least one Malfoy in our lives, right?

And Rowling’s character development was strategic and just brilliant:

“If you need to tell your readers something … there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it’s plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she’s handy.”

Same Problems
The theme of mortality and morality was evident in the books, and those are the same things we deal with in our world. It made the story much more interesting when we found out magic couldn’t solve everything. The parallels in social issues such as racism stood as another big theme that we could relate to as well.

“I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime would think of Nazi Germany. … I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the Wizarding world. So you have to the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is a great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves on nothing else, they can pride themselves on perceived purity. … The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books, but I think that it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.”

Even years after we were first enamored by Rowling’s world, some of us are still waiting for our invitations to Hogwarts. Hogwarts was a real place to the readers. It still is. But maybe it’s time to accept that the letter from Hogwarts won’t come anymore. Because it already had, the moment we picked up the first book in the series. As Rowling famously declared on Twitter, “All these people saying they never got their Hogwarts letter: you got the letter. You went to Hogwarts. We were all there together.”