Publishers searching for next 'Harry Potter'
Tue Jul 23, 9:59 AM ET

Deirdre Donahue USA TODAY

Forget those aging baby boomers and the potential of the large-print book market.

The eye-popping sales numbers for J.K. Rowling's series about that young wizard Harry Potter have stirred a hunger among book publishers for another junior blockbuster that will keep the little darlings ages 10 through 14 up all night reading. According to the 2000 Census figures, 20.5 million children are in this age group. In 1990, there were 17.1 million.

This fall, a number of prominent writers -- Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, Isabel Allende, Carl Hiaasen and Clive Barker, among others -- are publishing novels for 10- to 14-year-olds.

Diane Roback, the children's book editor of Publishers Weekly, says that in 15 years she has never seen so many writers doing books for younger readers. Harry Potter may be an influence, she says, having exposed these authors to the field of children's fantasy.

This is not ''cashing in'' on Rowling's success, she says, but an ''interesting and nice trend'' that could yield some excellent literature." The July publication of sci-fi writer Neil Gaiman's children's book, Coraline, proves, for example, that ''suspense knows no age.''

But please, don't send David Gale, the editorial director of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, any more manuscripts about boys on broomsticks. ''It's a joke nowadays,'' Gale says. ''Everything is 'the new Harry Potter.'"

''We want to publish the kind of books that will come anywhere near the Harry Potter numbers,'' Gale adds.

But simply adding a wand to a weak plot and creating a synthetic fantasy is not the answer. Gale notes that a recent young-adult success published by Delacorte, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares, has zero to do with wizards.

Barry Cunningham knows quite a bit about finding good books for young readers. In 1996, while working at the British publishing house Bloomsbury, he found an unknown author named J.K. Rowling. Now the CEO of Chicken House Books, based near Bath, England, he is championing another novel, The Thief Lord, by German children's writer Cornelia Funke. (Scholastic will distribute the novel, about two orphans on the run in Venice, in the USA in mid-September.)

Cunningham heard of the book in a passionate letter from an 11-year-old English girl named Clara who had read the book in the original German. ''It's always better to hear from real children than literary agents,'' he says.

Because his company publishes only 20 titles a year and he is looking to ''pioneer fresh talent'' for English-speaking readers, Cunningham had the time to pursue the tip. Funke, who has sold 100,000 copies of Thief Lord in Germany, told him she selected him as her publisher because he resembles the detective in Thief Lord and is a dead ringer for Bob Hoskins. ''It's never been an advantage before,'' he notes.

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