The Secret Ingredient to Making a Media Smash Hit Is…

You guessed it:

A dash of “I got a cool idea,” a pinch of “let’s take it a series so it takes a lot of books,” sprinkled with a healthy dose of “yes, that’s right, this could be you in these pages,” and the final, secret ingredient.

But that’s just it, the secret ingredient that makes Harry Potter so incredibly popular and authors like George R. R. Martin smashing successes is so secret that no one really knows why it happens.

The New Yorker recently published a very interesting investigation in...