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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32837
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Since you mention Rowling, let's talk about criticism of [Harry Potter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter#Literary_criticism).

- Harold Bloom complained about "clichés and dead metaphors". A S Byatt spoke of "intelligently patchworked derivative motifs", and described the books as "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip". Byatt's complaints clearly overlap with Bloom's, but also speak to how the works could be flawed yet popular: the "problem" may be appealing to certain features of modern readers Byatt dislikes.
- Such criticism may smack of elitism (and Charles Tayor has objected to Byatt's take on this), as may Sameer Rahim's complaint about how it's no _Oliver Twist_. But the argument that Rowling's work isn't as original as it's cracked up to be doesn't, and comes from not only Bloom and Byatt but also (as you'll see in that link) Michael Rosen and Usula K Le Guin. Of course, "it's unoriginal" isn't necessarily a good criticism. Works always use old tropes, but it's what they do with them that counts.
- Meanwhile, Stephen King has said, "Rowling's never met an adverb she did not like" (but let's not revisit here the are-adverbs-all-that-bad debate frequently seen on writing.se). Funnily enough, statistician Ben Blatt has shown "good" authors such as Stephen King don't use fewer adverbs; they use fewer -ly adverbs. King, unfortunately, is prone to misspeak on these issues.

I'm sure you can not only dig up but also assess analogous complaints about other successful authors; I'll leave that to you. I'll just mention some trivia on the is-Rowling-original front. For reasons that are probably beyond sociology's understanding, several UK authors had near-identical HPish ideas in the 1990s. It wasn't plagiarism; there was just something in the culture that was ready for this story. That's probably why it sold so well.

But how can "bad" writers be popular? Is the rabble just ignorant of what the good stuff looks like? Well, we can offer a less ivory-tower way of thinking about it than that. If you ever watch a _Cinema Sins_ video criticising a film you like, you'll realise there are countless kinds of things you could judge a work for but usually don't. (If you do, the problem may not so much be the aspect you complain about as the fact you were bored enough to spot it.) There are, let's say, a thousand things to judge a work on, and everyone cares about each one to a greater or lesser or no extent, and you could easily be too hard on a work or not hard enough on some front. With everyone's calibration unique, there are bound to be individual works a large percentage of people assess poorly.

There are many rules of writing. They're worth learning, not so much to stick to rigidly as to make an informed decision as a writer. (What effect, for example, do you have on readers when you use a said-bookism?) I recommend reading a few guides to see what it does for your writing style. Don't let the lesson here be, "Given how much money these people made, I needn't worry about X". The lesson should be, "They had the right qualities, or at least the right luck, to compensate, but don't unnecessarily hinder yourself."

Original score: 27