Within months, the last of the Harry Potter books will be released. Scholastic will gladly accept the piles of money that will pour in. Book sellers will welcome the throngs who will flock to the shops, to buy Harry Potter but maybe, just maybe, they'll pick up something else as well. There'll be Harry Potter merchandise, marketing gimcracks to be produced and sold on. Very many people make a living off of J.K. Rowling's invention.
And yet, Scholastic sees the dark at the end of the tunnel. The publishing house has benefited from the blockbuster sales, a long string of hits. This is the last, the seventh installment, and after July there will be no more Harry Potter. Ms. Rowling will be under pressure to come up with something else, but she's made her fortune and has no need to go back to grinding out another hit. She may not have another story in her, either. Harry Potter may have been the only character that spoke to her, insisting that his story be told, and now he's out and put on paper and the stories are gone with him.
This is the chance that YA authors have been waiting for. After Harry Potter took off, the market for YA rose with it, and publishers are longing to be the one to find the gem of a novel that will do for them what Rowling's works did for Scholastic. Even literary agents are getting in on the game, with more and more willing to consider YA fiction. You couldn't go wrong with several people at Writers House -- Daniel Lazar, Jodi Reamer, and the list goes on. Over at Vigliano Associates, Kirby Kim was brought in recently to expand their YA stable. In fact, if you look up Young Adult on Agentquery.com, you'll get a listing that runs over twenty pages.
Don't give up hope, all you adult fiction writers. We all pray that those young people who discovered the pleasures of reading through Ms. Rowling's works will grow into adult readers who will buy our novels, in the event that we ever get an agent and a publishing deal. Stranger things have happened.
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