The Harry Potter books have sold over 600 million copies, making around $7.7 billion dollars in profit.
They weren’t particularly well written, and were full of plot holes. But it became the best selling books series of all time because it did something that no other book had ever managed to do before, or since.
It made us believe in magic.
Here are the key steps in the story that made it happen:
Step 1: In the beginning
Harry is a bullied, lonely boy with no control over his life. He lives in the normal, depressing world we all recognise. He doesn't believe he belongs anywhere. He also doesn’t believe in magic.
Step 2: Throughout the middle
Harry finds out he's a wizard, and a famous one at that! He leaves the normal world behind, and goes off to the magical world of Hogwarts, where he makes his first real friends and finally feels like he belongs. He faces many challenges, and overcomes them all.
Step 3: By the end
Harry has a home, and a family, and knows he can stand up for himself. Even going back to the depressing normal world for the summer doesn’t seem so bad now. He knows that the world he belongs to, the one filled with good friends and exciting adventures - the magical world of witches and wizards - is right there waiting for him.
The Harry Potter books took the normal world that we live in every day, and created an exact copy of it with only one defining difference. Magic is real. Home, school, work, sports - all the things we recognise in our own lives are still there, but with a magic twist on top. It makes it easy to believe the world of Harry Potter is all around us, we just can’t see it.
By doing this, the books took a very common and reasonable belief - that magic only exists in imaginary worlds - and genuinely made us question it. What if we are just like Harry in the beginning? Stuck in the real world, unaware of what’s really out there. What if we got a letter from an owl inviting us to Hogwarts too? I mean, no one can prove it can’t happen, right?
This is what made Harry Potter the best selling book series of all time. Not only did it make the reader feel like they also belonged at Hogwarts, it made them believe in magic. That the world of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley could actually be right under our noses. Even if we only believed it for those few short hours we spent reading the books.