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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2461118" data-attributes="member: 5171">Ah, the irony of noting that the only posts to get responses are, in fact, the parodies of flame-rants.I'll keep it brief as I repeat, to see if anyone agrees, disagrees, what-have-you:It depends.You can define a genre by its content, or by its plot structure and theme, among any other number of ways to define a genre. If you define a genre by its content, then Rowling is obviously writing fantasy, as Pratchett noted ironically. If you define a genre by its plot structure and theme, she's still writing fantasy, in that it's a coming-of-age story, but enough of the plot elements are different in the pacing and structure that it's definitely not normal fantasy. So yeah, she's writing something different from normal epic fantasy... just like Pratchett and a whole lot of other people.She's not writing Jordan/Martin/Goodkind, and that's laudable whether you like Jordan/Martin/Goodkind or not, because the fantasy world needs variation, but it's hardly unique. What's unique is the combination of skill (writing something that engaged a lot of people) and luck (hitting the market at a time when the market was ready for something just like it), and for that, all I can say is bully for her -- you can't control the luck factor, so all you can do is write the best novel you can and hope for the best.(Sidenote: You can try to game the system -- "The market is ready for XXXXX", or "XXXXX is selling really well right now", but it doesn't usually work in fiction sales from the writer's viewpoint. By the time you write the novel to capitalize on the market trend, the trend has passed. It can work from the publisher's side, and I see a lot of YA magic novels doing reasonably well because they got a spillover marketing push and little tables at Borders that say "Already finished with Hogwarts? Try these to tide you over", but it doesn't work very well from the side of the guy who's going to write the thing. You just have to write what's in your heart as well as you can.)</blockquote>

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