A MUST READ From Hopelessness to Selling 400m Books and Then Billionaire! That was the feat achieved by Author, JK Rowling. Her story below.Now back to JK Rowling and her incredible story. British Author, JK Rowling came from humble background before writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, a children fantasy novel. The work was an international hit and Rowling wrote six more books in the series, which sold hundreds of millions and was adapted into a blockbuster film franchise. Seven years after graduating from the university, Rowling saw herself as “the biggest failure I knew”. Her marriage had failed, and she was jobless with a child. But she described her failure as liberating. “Failure meant stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged.” During the period, Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated even suicide. She completed her first novel while surviving on state welfare benefits. She wrote in many cafes whenever she could get her daughter Jessica to fall asleep. In 1990, while she was on a four-hour delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry came “fully formed” into her head. “To my immense frustration, I didn’t have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one…I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four-delayed train hours, while the details bubbled up in my brain. Perhaps if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them. I began to write the Philosopher’s Stone that very evening.” The manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finished on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to 12 publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. One of them advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. By the Summer of 2000, the first of the three Harry Potter books had earned about $480m in just three years, with over 35 million copies in print, in 35 languages. A film version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released in November 2001. In its opening weekend in the U.S, the film opened on a record 8,200 screens, and earned $93.5m, ($20m more than the previous records holder, the 1999 film, Jurassic Park.) Her books have sold more than 400 million copies, becoming the best-selling book series in history. JK is now England’s 13th Richest Woman, and richer than the Queen of England. Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated $15 billion. Not bad for a struggling woman who was told to forget writing.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 08:16:01 +0000
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