Viral Storytelling with The Story Lady, Ronda Del Boccio

My aunt Carol watches a lot of the hot” television shows, including most of the reality TV out there.  That’s not my cup of tea, as the saying goes, but that’s why there are so many forms of media available.  Carol knows a lot of the Hollywood stars.  She rattled off a few names, saying, “You must know who ___ is,” and in all but one of ten instances, my reply was, “Who?”

I love movies and a few television programs, but I’m not all that hyped up about stars.  As a lover of books, I am thrilled to find out the results of something that I generally don’t pay the least bit of attention to.  I didn’t even know there was a magazine called Entertainment Weekly.  You may be wondering what rock I’ve been hiding under, and I guess my only “defense,” if such were needed, is that I have enough trouble reading what I dearly want and need to read as it is.  When someone once tried to sell me 4 magazine subscriptions for a ridiculously low price, I said, “Sorry, but I’m mostly blind and I really don’t read magazines that much.”  The poor spluttering telemarketer had never heard that line and didn’t have a script for overcoming that particular objection, so he mumbled thanks and hung up the phone.

Entertainment Weekly selects 25 top entertainers each year, and they have some excellent criteria.  It’s not just about the box office splash that the stars make; it’s about the kind of people they are and the quality of the works they choose.  This year marks the first time the magazine has chosen an author.

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, is the Entertainment Weekly Entertainer of the year for 2007.  You can read the story here.

J. K. Rowling is one of those rare authors who went from nothing to sensation quickly.  The number of Harry Potter books sold nearly 400,000,000 (400 million).  The films have surpassed Star Wars and James Bond films to bring in the most revenue of any series.  The books take about 4,100 pages to tell Hary’s story.  She has managed to keep herself out of a good deal of media fray along the way as well.  She started off as a single mother just barely getting by and is now one of the richest women in the world.

The article in EW states:  In an era of videogame consoles, online multiplayer ”environments,” and tinier-is-better mobisodes, minisodes, and webisodes, she got people to tote around her big, fat old-fashioned printed-on-paper books as if they were the hottest new entertainment devices on the planet.”

I wonder how many children have become more interested in reading books because of J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter?

Congratulations on surpassing box office heavy-hitters and making such a huge impact on the world of books–and on readers.

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