“Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”                     Zig Ziglar

Late 1990 – Manchester, England: Jo boarded the late afternoon train bound for London’s King’s Cross Station only to learn that the train was delayed by four hours. At 25, she was divorced, jobless, with no money, living on government assistance, and a single mom of a four-month-old daughter. “I was as broke as one can get without being homeless,” she later lamented. “My life was a failure.” Depressed and sometimes suicidal, she was at rock bottom.

While passing the time in her train seat, Jo got an idea for a book about a boy wizard who takes a magical train to his magical boarding school. She didn’t have a pen to make notes and was embarrassed to borrow one. But she thought about the book the entire trip as vivid details bubbled up in her mind. She began writing the book that night.

Joanne Kathleen Rowling always loved to write. Her parents, Peter, an airplane mechanic, and Anne, a science teacher, encouraged her interest. At age 6, she wrote her first story about a rabbit. Growing up outside Bristol, England, Jo was an insatiable bookworm and loved classic British writers like Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien. She binge-read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy multiple times.

In 1982, Jo applied to Oxford University but didn’t get accepted. She ended up studying French at Exeter University. After college, she tried her hand at writing adult novels without success. After a year, her father told her, “Jo, your overactive writing imagination is an interesting personal quirk, but it will never pay a mortgage or earn a pension.” She got the message and found a job.

Jo moved to Portugal to teach English as a second language, married a journalist, and had a daughter, Jessica. The marriage was an abusive relationship and only lasted a year. Jo moved to Manchester, England, in late 1990. Her mother died from multiple sclerosis a month later, compounding her depressing situation.

Determined to finish her book, Jo and Jessica moved to Edinburg, Scotland. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was written in Edinburg cafes. Jo wrote and sipped coffee, all she could afford, while Jessica napped in her stroller.

Five publishers turned down Jo’s book before she found an agent, Christopher Little, in a literary directory in 1995. He eventually agreed to represent the book. After another handful of rejections, when it seemed there was no hope of getting the book published, Little sent a manuscript to Nigel Newton, the head of children’s books at Bloomsbury, a small British publisher.

He agreed to publish the book after his 8-year-old daughter read a chapter and loved it. Newton bought Jo’s manuscript for $2,250 but advised her “to find a day job. You have little chance of making a living writing children’s books.”

On June 26, 1997, Bloomsbury published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The initial printing was only 1000 copies and there was no money for advertising. The book’s popularity spread by word of mouth between children in neighborhoods, on playgrounds, and in schools. The printing increased to 30,000 copies and the book still sold. Harry Potter won most of the children’s book awards in the U.K. that year.

The phenomenal success of Harry Potter led to six other fantasy books in the series, each with increasing popularity and record-setting sales. The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, sold 3 million copies in 48 hours and won numerous awards. In 2005, book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sold nine million copies in 24 hours and won the British Book of the Year Award. Then in 2007, book seven, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, became the fastest-selling book of all time, selling 11 million copies in 24 hours.

The Harry Potter series is the best-selling literary collection in history, with more than 600 million copies sold. They have been printed in 85 languages. The books led to movies which led to theme parks and stage plays and hundreds of millions of Harry Potter fans worldwide.

Today J.K. Rowling lives in Edinburg. She is married to a Scottish doctor, and they have two children. She continues to write, including a crime fiction series, Comoran Strike, under the pen name Robert Galbraith. “Had I succeeded at anything else,” says J.K., “I might have never found the determination to succeed in the one area of my life where I truly belonged, writing. I had an old typewriter and a big idea.”