Who needs a new Harry Potter?

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury, £6.99), has now hit the shelves. While containing almost nothing about Harry Potter as a character it still harks back to his great days by incorporating notes from Professor Dumbledore on what is claimed to be a translation from the original runes by Hermione Granger.

Written to raise funds for neglected children in East Europe, this slightly wistful collection of five original fairy tales certainly deserves to become a Christmas bestseller. But a determined crowd-pleaser it is not, reading more like a farewell from the most commercially successful children's writer of all time (400 million Harry Potter books sold worldwide to date). The search for the next JK Rowling therefore remains as urgent as ever, with every publisher dreaming of the profits that have catapulted Bloomsbury into the force it is today.

Currently published children's writers can probably be ruled out from fulfilling this role, given that they have already established their particular brands of fiction to lesser or greater effect. Somebody else is therefore needed one day to satisfy what will then be new demands in children's fiction. In her time Enid Blyton managed this by inventing heroic child characters who always get everything right just when in real life the balance at home and school was moving from adult domination towards children gaining more power. Roald Dahl, another huge commercial success, pushed this tendency further forward into overt fantasy, adding an extra measure of mischievous subversion. Rowling herself continued in this vein – has there ever been a parental couple more worthy of disrespect than Harry's foster parents Mr and Mrs Dursley? She also located her endlessly resourceful child hero in fantasy land. The chances are that the next best-selling children's author will do the same thing.

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In Britain a genius like Jacqueline Wilson continues to get away with distinctly gritty urban realism in her very popular fiction, although her American sales are nothing like as good as those at home. But our modern world of growing population problems and dwindling resources makes a poor arena for the atmosphere of optimism that most children in the West still prefer by the time a story comes to its end. While older teenagers do often go for dystopian novels and pessimistic realism, the "misery lit" that until recently had been so successful with adults holds less attraction for younger readers. There are therefore great opportunities for fantasy writers who are best able to invent convincing alternative universes within which heroes, usually against enormous odds, still manage to put everything to rights by the last chapter. For while a truly final victory over anything at all now seems an unlikely idea in our own times, in most fantasy stories more hopeful outcomes continue to rule.

Should they decide on fantasy, let's hope tomorrow's world-beating author no longer toils too faithfully in the footsteps of Tolkien. Over-blown rhetoric belongs better these days to the heady world of video games. In the cold light of print it can soon come to look hollow. Some pale Tolkienesque imitations, such as Christopher Paolini's Eragon books, still get by with good sales. But these wrist-breakingly heavy volumes, complete with their own dwarf language plus extensive glossaries, feel like the end of one trend rather than the beginning of another. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga is also selling prodigiously well, with a film version released this month. Yet her romantic take on the loves of Jacob Black, a handsome young werewolf, and a teenage Count Dracula figure named Edward Cullen, is too deliberately skewed towards female readers to count as truly universal bestsellers in the way that the Harry Potter stories were.

Our author of the future would be well advised to think in terms of a series. Stand-alone children's books can have a tough time with young readers, who often prefer to stick with stories whose characters and locations don't each time have to be re-created. A series also has more chance of involving other readers. It is always nice to find someone else with whom to compare notes over a favourite book, particularly when readers are young and anxious to check out how others in the peer group are reacting. There is also the joy throughout childhood and sometimes well beyond of collecting anything, including books with identical formats – a trick Beatrix Potter woke up to early in her own writing career.

Some successful modern children's novels feature anti-heroes, most notably Eoin Colfer's brilliant Artemis Fowl series. Yet on the whole young readers still expect traditional heroes, brave in adversity and selfless in their particular quest. But any junior hero/ heroine in this future best-seller should, at least at the start of their adventures, still be of tender years. The last truly adult hero in popular children's books was that under-stated airman Biggles, who was soon switched by his author, WE Johns, from drinking whisky to drinking lemonade once the extent of his juvenile readership became clear.

But young readers today want to read about others just like themselves, often perhaps a little older than they are but still not having completely gone over to the adult side. As to gender, either a boy (Harry Potter) or a girl (Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series) can now take centre stage while still managing to appeal to readers of both sexes, although plenty of back up from the opposite gender in minor roles will help.

Some romance will also be in order, although probably not going beyond the chaste kiss Anthony Horowitz's 14-year-old hero Alex Rider occasionally thinks about when in the company of his enticingly named contemporary female friend Sabina Pleasure. But seeking to make a splash by writing stories that are mainly there to challenge traditional taboos in children's literature now seems out of date. Explicit sexual imagery (Melvin Burgess's Doing It), delinquent parents (Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum), drug taking (Kevin Brooks's Candy) and under-age sex (Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now) have almost become common currency in modern writing for young readers. Nor is there much silence left to break about dreadful events from the past that were formerly thought to be unsuitable as subjects for childhood reading. Different aspects of the Holocaust now crop up in children's fiction almost to excess. Novels about mothers, fathers, brothers or even main characters dying of a lingering disease are similarly ubiquitous. So whoever you are, new best-selling author, please try to find something else to write about and give us all a break.

Lastly, style. As a wordsmith Rowling is always good, writing clear, uncluttered prose and, like Blyton before her, excellent at carrying a story forward. Not for her those broken-backed sentences over-loaded with adjectives and adverbs. She is also funny, able to make not just her dialogue but also her descriptive passages interesting, with normally inanimate objects possessing lives of their own just as they do in some video games.

Her great popularity started almost entirely from word of mouth from child to child until she came to greater public attention by winning the Smarties Gold Prize for her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Any new bestseller must rely upon the same playground bush telegraph spreading the good news about the arrival of another compulsively readable book, since there is a limit to how much publishers and critics can push any title upon a young public. Our writer will have a hard act to follow, but the day will still come when another huge bestseller will arrive to supply exactly what its young readers now living in new times most seem to want.

Four modern fantasy writers to watch

Dominic Barker, Blart: The Boy Who Didn't Want To Save the World

Dominic Barker's 'Blart: The Boy Who Didn't Want to Save the World' (Bloomsbury) and its two successors are the funniest fantasy stories currently available. Plotting is also excellent, with the repellent but oddly endearing Blart and his dodgy friends always just managing to escape from tight corners.

Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

'The Knife of Never Letting Go' (Walker) is the first novel by Patrick Ness, and is already said to be a deserved prizewinner. More titles are promised in the same series from this exciting new author whose genuinely original vision combines with a masterly story-telling technique.

Jonathanv Stroud, the Bartimaeus trilogy

Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy (consisting of 'The Amulet of Samarkand', 'The Golem's Eye' and 'Ptolemy's Gate') (Doubleday) brilliantly combines excitement with humour; even his footnotes are funny. He has now followed on with 'Heroes of the Valley', a thoughtful story also rich in comic possibilities. Here is an author who never disappoints.

Catherine Fisher, Sapphique

The author of 13 high-class fantasy novels, from 'The Conjuror's Game' in 1990 to 'The Weather Dress' in 2005, Catherine Fisher's latest story is 'Sapphique' (Hachette), part of her Incarceron series. The novel displays all of her usual strength of imagination. Those who have not read her novels already should put this omission right; she is simply too good to miss.