Just like how Michael Jordan played baseball competently and then came back to play basketball superbly, J.K. Rowling will be re-entering the children’s fiction racket…at least for one book. The Casual Vacancy may have coasted to a big debut, selling 124,603 copies or ten times the next-highest debut, but J.K. Rowling knows that those are Hufflepuff numbers compared to what the Harry Potter books debuted at, and so has appropriately announced that her next book will be for kids. Speaking to an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Rowling revealed that she has “a number of ideas” on her laptop, but kept mum on any other details either because she wants to keep everyone guessing, or because her next book is an anticlimactic postscript to the Potter saga — a pop-up book about how Harry actually failed grammar school and has to go back and repeat K-5 before he can actually collect his Hogwarts degree and assume control of his godfather’s chain of wizard hotels. Or something.
Rowling had a hunch that The Casual Vacancy would do well, it being not only her first book since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in 2007, but her first adult novel after writing the most successful children’s books ever. In addition to teasing the crowd with news that she’s jumping back into the children’s book racket, she told everyone about how she makes up bedtime stories just for her kids, but that nobody else would appreciate those stories. “They are tailored very much for my children,” Rowling told an audience that apparently showed up at Cheltenham to have the promise of more Rowling fiction dangled over their snouts, “so don’t expect to see those being published anytime soon.”
Hear that, faithful readers? You’ll just have to deal with your own shitty bedtime stories, probably about princesses and princes having chaste liaisons in vaguely enchanted dells watched over by a sorcerer whose magic seeps through the plot holes in your amateurish narratives.
JK Rowling says next book will be for children [BBC]