More so than a collection of stories, the âHarry Potterâ series can be characterized by its most devoted fans as a hobby, or a lifestyle. The increasingly voluminous installments were hefty enough to get lost in, and they managed to create not only a convincing world, but lovable characters, too.
Itâs hard to imagine a world in which the books (and films, and video games, and personality quizzes) might not have been published. But, according to J.K. Rowlingâs first agent Christopher Little, Harry Potter and the Philosopherâs Stone was not an easy sell.
Little told HuffPost over email that Rowling selected him as her agent in part due to his name, which she liked. He was, in turn, enamored of her story, believing after reading it that it was ready to be sent out to publishers, requiring few big changes. (The rules of Quidditch, however, were altered.)
Below, Little describes the experience of trying to sell a book he believed in â in spite of publishersâ protestations that it was too long or too âexclusive.â
When Rowling first found an agent, he compared her world-building talent to Tolkienâs.
âWhen I received the submission from Joanne (as she was known at the time) Rowling, it just came in as an unsolicited submission (of the first three chapters) and was picked up by our then office manager who was looking through the slush pile,â he said. âShe liked it and bought it to my attention. Once I read it, I had no reservations whatsoever and in fact felt very excited about it.
âIt was clearly presented as a fully realized world [âŠ] I donât think I recall reading anything so immersive since The Lord of the Rings many years earlier. We quickly wrote back to Jo asking to see the rest of the manuscript as soon as I had finished those initial chapters.â
Rowling chose to write under the name âJ.K.â in order to appeal to young boy readers.
âThe suggestion to use initials instead of J.K. Rowlingâs given name, Joanne, came from discussion with Bloomsbury. Itâs notoriously harder to get boys to read in comparison with girls, as many parents will know, and an author being obviously female was more likely to be off-putting to boys. Joanne selected the âKâ after her paternal grandmother.â