Melissa Anelli

Anelli also is one of three hosts of the Leaky Cauldron's official podcast PotterCast, which talks about various aspects of the Harry Potter books, movies, video games and more.

She says she was drawn into the series by its underlying message of tolerance and love, which she believes was especially needed as the United States geared for war.

It took a year before the movie studio took her seriously and began answering her questions with reportable information, and a longer period of time before the publishers agreed to do the same.

[5] By November 2008, largely under Anelli's influence, the site became the second most popular English-language Harry Potter fansite, with over 1 million hits per day.

[7] In 2005, Rowling personally invited Anelli and Emerson Spartz, the teenage webmaster of popular fansite Mugglenet, to Edinburgh, Scotland for the release of the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

At one point, Spartz referred to fans who believed that characters Harry Potter and Hermione Granger would become a couple as "delusional", and Anelli and Rowling laughed.

In 2008, Anelli began receiving threatening messages from Jessica Elizabeth Parker, a resident of New Zealand, whom she had banned from commenting at The Leaky Cauldron for offensive behavior.

[17] Tim Cornwell in The Scotsman explains that "the book captures the flavour of Pottermania, where fans' e-mails fly...with the latest breathless news of the writer and her progeny.

"[16] Another review in the same paper, by Ernie Waters, says, "Anelli unravels what lies beneath the Harry Potter phenomenon and how it feels to be so wrapped up in the mystical world...It tries, and largely succeeds, to explain just what it is about the boy wizard which inspires such deep-seated devotion.