The Making of the Potterverse (3 page)

The
Irish Times
offered a story that expressed amazement at the success of the Harry Potter novels, noting in particular that they had knocked John Grisham from the top of the bestseller lists.

In reviewing
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
,
Booklist
opined, “Rowling’s first novel, which has won numerous prizes in England, is a brilliantly imagined and beautifully written fantasy that incorporates elements of traditional British school stories without once violating the magical underpinnings of the plot. In fact, Rowling’s wonderful ability to put a fantastic spin on sports, student rivalry, and eccentric faculty contributes to the humor, charm, and, well, delight of her utterly captivating story.” Added the
Columbus Dispatch,
“Published last year in Great Britain and released just this month in the United States, the novel blends a rollicking adventure with supernatural inventions and themes of courage and home. Compared by English reviewers to Roald Dahl fantasies, the novel does indeed bear similarities: flamboyant characters clearly divided into camps of good and evil, an unsqueamish embrace of sorcery, and empowered children who nevertheless remain childlike.”

So many tourists have come to King’s Cross station in London looking for Platform 9¾, the station management decided to erect a sign. (Fionna Boyle)

Heyday Films (David Heyman’s company) officially announced its acquisition of the film rights to the Harry Potter novels, with Warner Brothers as official distributors. Said Rowling, “I am in a kind of stunned relief. The talks went on for months and months and at some stages I thought it would never happen. It will be an incredible experience to see in real life what I have seen inside my mind. It will be quite disorientating, but wonderful.”

Bloomsbury expected sales of Harry Potter novels to exceed 300,000 by the end of the year.

The AP conducted an interview with Rowling in which she made an interesting comment about the creative process: “I have a very
visual imagination. I see it, then I try to describe what is in my mind’s eye,’’ she said.

Early in the month, J.K. Rowling sat for an in-depth interview with National Public Radio.

In a short profile of Rowling,
Newsweek
wrote, “Rowling’s Cinderella-like story began eight years ago in Edinburgh. An unemployed schoolteacher and the divorced mother of a three-month-old daughter, she began to write out of desperation, convinced that she had nothing left to lose. To escape her chilly flat, she wheeled her daughter’s stroller through the streets until the baby fell asleep. Then she would dash into a coffee shop and write. Unable to afford either a word processor or the cost of copying her manuscript, she typed it out twice and sent it off to publishers. The day her English publisher bought the story, she says, was ‘comparable only to having my daughter.’”

Rowling took part in an online chat hosted by Amazon.co.uk. In that interview she pointed out that, “My first two novels — which I never tried to get published — were for adults. I suppose I might write another one, but I never really imagine a target audience when I’m writing. The ideas come first, so it really depends on the idea that grabs me next.”

The months that followed brought many interviews with J.K. Rowling in which she detailed aspects of the process of creation, such as how the idea for Harry Potter had come to her while riding on a train; the development of certain characters; her struggles as a single mother and the financial desperation she was living through; and the fact that even at this early stage of her success, her life was definitely on an upward swing. The indication was also that she simply had no idea how successful she and her creation would ultimately become.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
was published on June 2, debuting at the #1 position on several charts, and the publisher quickly moved 700,000 copies.
Entertainment Weekly
reported,
“Originally scheduled for fall ’99,
Chamber of Secrets
was rushed out three months early because Scholastic was horrified by the flood of Internet sales of the British edition.” For this same reason, Scholastic announced that they would be publishing book three,
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
, in the near future, only a few weeks after its British publication.
Entertainment Weekly
speculated, “Some publishing insiders believe the series may spur big changes in the industry: Rights to popular authors may soon be sold by language instead of by country.”

While appearing on Britain’s Radio 4’s Book Club series, J.K. Rowling was asked her opinion of why Harry Potter had taken off the way he had, with host James Naughtie noting, “Nothing like this has happened in children’s literature for quite a long time.” Said Rowling, “I always find it very hard to talk about the book in these terms, because I find it very, very difficult to be objective about them. To me, they remain my private little world. I was writing about Harry for five years before anyone else read a word of him and it’s still an amazing feeling to me to be in a room, as we are today, with people whose heads are also populated with these characters, because, as I say, for five years, they were my private secret. From the moment I had the idea for the book, I could see a lot of comic potential in the idea that wizards walk among us and that we are foolishly blind to the fact that the reason that we keep losing our keys is that wizards are bewitching them for fun.