Monday’s #inspirational #entrepreneur this week is the lovely JK Rowling who earns approximately £5 every second. She followed her dream for Harry Potter and created a global brand and franchise movie series which, to date, is the highest grossing film series of all time. Her name was shortened from Joanne to JK when her publishers insisted that the boys for whom the book was intended, would not want to read a book written by a lady. (I kid you not!). In 2007 Forbes granted her 48th position as the most powerful celebrity of 2007.
JK Rowlings Harry Potter book series has sold over 400 million copies with them now having reached the best-selling book series in history. Not content with being a very successful Author, during negotiations with Warner Brothers film studio, she insisted on retaining the rights to the overall approval on the scripts, together with retaining creative control by serving as a producer on the final installment in the franchise.
What an inspirational female entrepreneur she is. The lessons to be learned from JK Rowling are those hard earned at the school of hard knocks. Her book was rejected by 12 publishing houses before the publishing house Bloomsbury signed her up. She knows the hard graft and determination it takes to keep a project going. The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone was published by Bloomsbury in 1997, with an initial print run of 1,000 copies, 500 of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000 (run, run my Darlings to find one!). The final Harry Potter book being completed in 2007 (Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows).
Within the space of only five years, she went from living off of state aid benefits to multi-millionaire status. (How’s your five year plan gong by the way?). JK Rowling made it onto the Sunday Times Richest List in 2008 with her fortune now estimated to be standing at €798 million.
What next for JK Rowling? In 2012 she published a tragicomedy called The Casual Vacancy and just this year she published under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith with a work entitled The Cuckoos Calling (a crime fiction novel). She has also become a leading philanthropist supporting causes such as Comic Relief.
Incidentally she recently stayed at the beautiful Ballyfin Demesne, located in County Laois, Ireland, which was refurbished by our own www.teamwoodcraft.com (it’s a small world indeed).
You can find out more about JK Rowling here.
