J. K. Rowling

Yesterday I picked up from the library's sale shelf a copy of a random book: J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter. I'm afraid it's not "literary sojourner" material; it's a silly book intended for grade schoolers. However, it answered a question I had: how did the first Harry Potter book surge into our literary landscape so quickly and with such intensity? Having worked in the publishing industry, I knew that there was some serious marketing involved. But why? What moved the publishers to propel an anywoman's story to the top, granting an ordinary person such fame and fortune??

My first encounter with Harry Potter was in the fall of 1998 when living in Manhattan, a girlfriend sent me her copy of Sorcerer's Stone. I was not impressed. Having read many fantastic stories as a child, I could not see anything novel about this one. I couldn't make it through more than two chapters. It was OK, but not particularly captivating to me. I mean, what about Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time? Brillliant. I passed the book to a younger cousin.

The answer to my question is this: when the book was offered to the American market, the publication rights were auctioned, and unheard of figure of $100, 000 was the winning bid. Because so much money had been pinned to the project, understandably the publisher did everything in his power to make the book successful. It was already a great success in the U.K., and it came to be the same in the U.S. the buzz just grew, paving the way for future books.

After a failed marriage in Portugal, Rowling returned to the U.K. with a baby to care for and spent a year on public welfare while she finished up the first Potter book and obtained an agent to represent her. Her gamble paid off: an agent agreed to field (? what's the right word?) her manuscript, and much later it was accepted by a small publisher.

I still haven't read any of the Potter books and don't know if I ever will. My husband has found them entertaining and says they get better as the series progresses. Apparently Rowling wrote the first two and was then commissioned to write a total of seven books. It was at that point that she planned out what would happen in each.

J.K. Rowling as an individual seems to be still quite ordinary, except that she is now very well-known and rich. I was interested to learn how she went from nobody to superstar. (Forbes named her the first to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books). Now, she is selling handwritten stories for millions of dollars...