The extent of her success can be summarised in a number: 450 million. This is the number of Harry Potter books she has sold, making her the biggest-selling female author in the history of publishing and the Harry Potter saga, translated into over 70 languages, the most widely read series in the world. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released on 21 July 2007 and sold 11 million copies in its first 24 hours in the UK alone, the equivalent of around 20 copies a second. Even Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada” hankers after the unpublished manuscript, asking her desperate assistant to get hold of it for her before it is released.
The seeds of success
Joanne Rowling’s success is the fruit of her determination, immense talent and drive. Hers is a story of a woman that sacrificed a great deal so as not to give up on the biggest thing of all: her dream of seeing her stories on the shelves of bookshops.
After graduating in English Literature, Rowling immediately moved to Portugal to teach English. There she found love and got married before her luck ran out. In 1993 her husband left her shortly after the birth of her daughter. Unemployed, separated, with a small child and living on meagre welfare benefits: these were the most difficult years of her life. J.K. Rowling decided to move in with her sister in Edinburgh.
As she has herself described, she became depressed and, staring into a financial, social and personal abyss, she chose the most difficult way out: that of continuing to pursue her dream. In order to finish the first Harry Potter book, she would head to her brother-in-law’s cafe every day together with her daughter and write there. A penniless single mother with no prospects, people said she was a failure.
“The sensations that the Harry Potter characters feel when confronted with a Dementor are the same as those that J.K. Rowling felt in Edinburgh.”
Five years after she wrote the first lines, the final draft of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was complete. But it wouldn’t be an immediate success: all of the publishing houses to whom Rowling sent the manuscript rejected it. In 1996 she was finally rewarded for her determination when small publishing company Bloomsbury agreed to publish her book. The rest is history.
J.K. Rowling’s speech at Harvard University
Read here the complete speech.
Determination is a talent
J.K. Rowling learned to live with and then overcome her lack of confidence and pessimism, feelings common to many of us. Because talent isn’t always enough if you want to be successful. As this story shows, a steely belief in your own abilities is also necessary if you want to make your dreams come true. J.K. Rowling was racked with doubt but she was sure of one thing: that if you don’t believe in yourself nobody else will.