A few days after Pottermore announced its “12 Days of Christmas” campaign, I came across an article within “muggle media” (which is a term that I’ve started using lately to refer to “non-fandom” media—websites that aren’t solely focused on a few fictional fandoms, like this one is) sharing that announcement. The article was probably touting J.K. Rowling’s supposed upcoming “twelve new Harry Potter stories“, which, as I’ve said many times, is misleading, because the new content that Rowling posts on Pottermore generally does not follow a story format.
Anyway, I happened to read a few of the comments on this article, and I found one of them to be very disheartening. Since I don’t remember where I saw it, I can’t look up the exact words, but paraphrased, it basically said this:
Why bother. I’m sure J.K. Rowling has all the Pottermore stories ghostwritten at this point.
For those who don’t know the term “ghostwriting”, it’s when someone else writes most (if not all) of the content, but that content is attributed to another (more famous) author. In other words, Pottermore uses the words “New Content from J.K. Rowling”, but it’s actually written by a writer (or a staff of writers) who works for Pottermore. I am writing this article now in hopes to refute that claim and claims like it. I don’t pretend to have any inside information from Pottermore, so what I’m about to say is speculation, but at least it’s, I think, very logical speculation.
“All the content she writes is new; it’s like she’s writing fan fiction of her own novels”
One excuse that people might have in favor of this content being ghostwritten is that all the content is new, or that it feels like fan fiction—based on canon, but not actually canon. This particular excuse is pretty weak, considering that most of the new content is about some background place or secondary character, and that the articles are very encyclopedic in nature. J.K. Rowling has long said that she has wanted to write an encyclopedia about Harry Potter, because she has notebooks upon notebooks of background information that didn’t make its way into the books. In fact, you might remember that Rowling wrote an article about this very thing on Pottermore, back in the fourth chapter of the first book:
I also found myself developing storylines for secondary (even tertiary) characters that were superfluous to requirements. More of a wrench were the plots I worked out for some much more important characters that had to be sacrificed for the bigger story. All of these I inwardly termed “ghost plots”, my private expression for all the untold stories that sometimes seemed quite as real to me as the “final cut”.
J.K. Rowling may write plots about ghosts (Professor Binns, for example), and she may have several ghost plots that she has already released or plans to release on Pottermore in the future (Florean Fortescue is a prime example from yesterday), but I do not believe that she would allow her name to be associated with a ghostwriter. She’s just way too classy for that. It’s her story. We are reading her words.
J.K. Rowling isn’t a pushover. She takes ownership of her creation. She was in on the process of building the theme parks. She was in on the process of making the movies. She will release the content that she wants to release, not because Pottermore executives request it. Remember that the Pottermore idea was her brainchild too, though it was created through a partnership with Sony at the time. If you can reach back into the recesses of your minds, you might remember that even before Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s official website had a few ghost plots (I distinctly remember one about Seamus Finnigan, which I have not yet seen on Pottermore since it was removed from jkrowling.com) and other articles on it.
I think the only instance where Pottermore executives probably asked J.K. Rowling specifically for brand-new content (rather than old ghost plots from an old notebook) was during the Quidditch World Cup this past summer. I highly doubt that Jo had originally planned to release all those Quidditch match details or the actual new Harry Potter story (the new story with Harry Potter in it that basically broke the Internet when it was released), though we’re all glad that she did. This is why we haven’t seen any more Daily Prophets since the Quidditch World Cup: because J.K. Rowling only agreed to write those few articles about those Quidditch matches, not any more.
“She doesn’t have time to write all that content, with Robert Galbraith’s novels, Fantastic Beasts, etc”
I think we all can agree that J.K. Rowling is a busy lady. She’s writing a trilogy of movies based on Newt Scamander’s travels, not to mention she plans to write more books about Cormoran Strike than she did about Harry Potter, but I don’t see why this is an excuse as to why she can’t also write the content for Pottermore herself. What you need to understand is that (with the exception of the Daily Prophets during the Quidditch World Cup) she has much of this content written already. She just needs to send it off to Pottermore to transcribe and incorporate into the website. I’m sure this doesn’t happen on a daily basis; she is probably in contact with Pottermore once every few months to give them the new content, but Pottermore holds onto it until the artists can finish drawing the pictures, the sound technicians to finish recording the sounds, the programmers to finish writing the code, etc—whatever work goes into creating a moment on Pottermore.
Perhaps this happens even more infrequently than that. Maybe Rowling simply gave Pottermore all her notebooks at once, and they’re choosing what to release when (rather than releasing everything all at once in a published encyclopedia that we would all probably buy in a heartbeat). However, I seriously doubt the idea that it was a single handoff—as I’ve said already, I believe that J.K. Rowling takes enough ownership over Harry Potter, her baby, her brainchild, her creation, that she couldn’t let anyone else decide what new content to release and when. I’m sure she makes decisions about a lot of things over at Pottermore. But I also don’t believe for a second that she allows it to consume her life, especially when she has so many other ongoing projects in her life that probably take precedence for her.
Furthermore, have you seen most of the articles on Pottermore? They’re usually three, four, maybe five paragraphs long on average. She can write one of those articles in 15 minutes. Actually, it’s taken me a little over an hour to write this, and it’s… what a minute… this article is over 1,100 words long? How did I let that happen?
Do you think that the new content on Pottermore is ghostwritten? Share your opinion in the comments!
