Your Next J.K. Rowling Purchase Won’t Be For The Kids

J.K. Rowling isn’t ready to hang up her pen just yet. Despite the massive commercial success of the Harry Potter franchise, the authoress apparently has a new book in store — and she’s not looking to sell this new one to your kids.

Rowling has a new book deal with the publishing house Little, Brown, which will be releasing her grownup novel later in 2012. The deal is speculated to be worth more than £5million in a her highly anticipated return to the shelves. The Harry Potter creator may be looking to expand her literary repetoire with a book for adults, but it seems that there is also a commercial incentive to aim older this time around.

A spokesperon for the British book retailer Waterstones reportedly observed:

“JK Rowling’s audience is vast and her position is unique. The Harry Potter books were a global success and her fans are very loyal. Children that were eight, nine, or ten when the books first came out in the 1990s are now in their 20s. Plenty of adults loved the books regardless of whether they had children, so the potential market for her is huge.”

So perhaps those older nieces, nephews, cousins, and even those millenial parents are all prime commercial targets for this upcoming Rowling work. As a little girl of the 90s myself, I can’t deny that my eyes would linger a little bit longer on a table of new JK Rowling hardcovers — regardless of the premise. That name is just too synynomous with late book night releases, the debut of new Harry Potter covers, and that image of my eighth grade quad swarming with reading kids, their noses firmly planted in a new release from the series.

Rowling may be a writer, but in developing a book specifically for her aging childhood readership, she is definitely employing Disney’s famous cradle to the grave marketing tactic.

(photo: WENN)