The Tales of Beedle the Bard, or, Dear Ms. Rowling.

Dear Ms. Rowling,

You need to stop writing crappy, small books.  Here is the reality of your Harry Potter companion pieces: The only people who are remotely interested in reading them are the children who grew up with the novels and are interested in delving deeper into the one-dimensional world you created.  While I commend you for taking a leaf out of Tolkien's book and trying to write works that give your original creation more credibility, your companion pieces are lacking, and, quite frankly, insulting.

Look at those horrible, 3-inch margins and excessive use of images. 

If you're going to write The Tales of Beedle the Bard, the most important book to Harry, Ron, and Hermione in the seventh novel, try to put a little more effort into it.  Come up with 20 three paragraph tales instead of five.  Expand the margins a little bit so I don't have to turn the page so often.  Your lack of content and clearly large misuse of white-space would make any High School English teacher laugh at your meager attempt to stretch out a 20 page book into 100.

Try and make the book look and feel like the magical children's work it is in the world of Harry Potter.  Is your creation of Beedle the Bard the one Mrs. Weasley used to read to Ron when he was little?  Absolutely not.  But wasn't your goal to make it so?

If I were you, I would either go all out--create beautiful leather bound fat works that look like they just came off the shelf of Dumbledore's office--or do nothing at all.  Or, entitle these leaflets "Excerpts from [name of book].  


All in all, as a faithful reader I don't really understand what you meant to accomplish by these piddly pieces, but my hope for you is that your next attempt at re-establishing your writing career is a bigger success than these let-downs.

Yours,
April Walker, Order of Merlin (3rd class), Hermione Impersonator, and Wizard/Muggle Relations Advocate.