JK Rowling wanted to keep her identity secret when she published her crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling under a pseudonym, but Twitter put paid to that
Angry: JK Rowling issued a
furious statement criticising the legal firm Russells after her identity was
revealed Photo:
REUTERS
By Jon Stock
It began with a barely literate tweet. At 11.34pm, on Wednesday July 10,
Fleet Street columnist India Knight told her 95,000 followers that she was
enjoying a new novel. “The book I’m reading (detective nov called The Cuckoo’s
Call, Robert Galbraith, so good, feat/ghastly cokey v think Mayfair women) has
++”.
A few minutes later, Harriet Green, family editor of The Guardian, asked if
it was a good choice for holiday reading. Knight said yes. Then, at 12.07am, a
follower called @JudeCallegari dropped a bombshell about the book.
Callegari’s tweets have since been deleted and her account suspended, but it
has been possible to piece together for the first time the ensuing conversation
between Callegari and Knight, using screengrabs that were taken at the time:
JC: “Written by JK Rowling”
IK: “Eh?”
JC: “It’s her pseudonym – promise its true”
IK: “Seriously? How do you know?”
JC: “Seriously. Friend works for publisher”
So began a series of events that would lead to the unmasking of Robert Galbraith as JK Rowling, The Cuckoo’s Calling’s rise from 4,709th position in the Amazon sales chart to number one, and a search for the source of the biggest leak in recent publishing history – a whodunit mystery that would tax even Cormoran Strike, the ex-military police gumshoe at the heart of Rowling’s new book.
When the mystery was finally solved on Thursday, a senior lawyer’s reputation was in question and a Surrey housewife was holed up in her five-bedroom home in Claygate, refusing to answer journalists’ questions over the intercom. As for Rowling, she made it known that she was “very angry” and “disappointed”.
In the hours immediately after Rowling’s cover was blown last weekend, there was a widespread belief that the affair had been a clever publicity campaign orchestrated by her publishers, Little, Brown. Since its publication in April, The Cuckoo’s Calling had sold 449 copies in the UK, according to Nielsen Bookscan, and a further 1,000 copies overseas. And Rowling herself had seemed surprisingly relaxed at being outed. “I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” the 47-year-old author said.
But then, as is so often the case, the unmasking of Rowling began to look more like cock-up than conspiracy. By Monday night, bookshops and wholesalers were sold out, and a massive reprint wasn’t going to reach the shelves for five days, even though the publisher’s printers were “working round the clock”. Good for ebook sales, a missed opportunity for bookshops.
And, in a sobering assessment of the publishing industry, it emerged that sales of 1,500 copies in hardback for a debut crime writer were deemed perfectly respectable – certainly not disastrous enough for Little Brown or Rowling herself to turn to the nuclear option of revealing Galbraith’s real identity.
As bookshops and online retailers began to prepare for the imminent and unexpected windfall, attention inevitably turned to the book’s publication back in April. Kate Mills, publishing director of Orion, was brave enough to admit that she had turned it down – a rejection that has been compared, in terms of lost revenue, with the dozen or so publishers who passed on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. “When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good,” Mills said. “It was certainly well written – but it didn’t stand out.”
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JC: “It’s her pseudonym – promise its true”
IK: “Seriously? How do you know?”
JC: “Seriously. Friend works for publisher”
So began a series of events that would lead to the unmasking of Robert Galbraith as JK Rowling, The Cuckoo’s Calling’s rise from 4,709th position in the Amazon sales chart to number one, and a search for the source of the biggest leak in recent publishing history – a whodunit mystery that would tax even Cormoran Strike, the ex-military police gumshoe at the heart of Rowling’s new book.
When the mystery was finally solved on Thursday, a senior lawyer’s reputation was in question and a Surrey housewife was holed up in her five-bedroom home in Claygate, refusing to answer journalists’ questions over the intercom. As for Rowling, she made it known that she was “very angry” and “disappointed”.
In the hours immediately after Rowling’s cover was blown last weekend, there was a widespread belief that the affair had been a clever publicity campaign orchestrated by her publishers, Little, Brown. Since its publication in April, The Cuckoo’s Calling had sold 449 copies in the UK, according to Nielsen Bookscan, and a further 1,000 copies overseas. And Rowling herself had seemed surprisingly relaxed at being outed. “I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” the 47-year-old author said.
But then, as is so often the case, the unmasking of Rowling began to look more like cock-up than conspiracy. By Monday night, bookshops and wholesalers were sold out, and a massive reprint wasn’t going to reach the shelves for five days, even though the publisher’s printers were “working round the clock”. Good for ebook sales, a missed opportunity for bookshops.
And, in a sobering assessment of the publishing industry, it emerged that sales of 1,500 copies in hardback for a debut crime writer were deemed perfectly respectable – certainly not disastrous enough for Little Brown or Rowling herself to turn to the nuclear option of revealing Galbraith’s real identity.
As bookshops and online retailers began to prepare for the imminent and unexpected windfall, attention inevitably turned to the book’s publication back in April. Kate Mills, publishing director of Orion, was brave enough to admit that she had turned it down – a rejection that has been compared, in terms of lost revenue, with the dozen or so publishers who passed on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. “When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good,” Mills said. “It was certainly well written – but it didn’t stand out.”
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