I’m sure most of you saw Harry Potter in your childhood, and I’m sure some of you were rabid admirers of J. K. Rowling’s fantastic concept novel Harry Potter.
She is a woman who has written one of the most popular books in history. J.K Rowling is remarkable and motivating in every way.
However, most of you are unaware of her failure before being famous.
J.K. Rowling’s Success Story
After a series of failures, true success emerges. That is precisely what occurred to J.K. Rowling. Her professional life was not going well, and she was facing new difficulties every day.
True, with the right tools and technologies, you can archive any desire. But, now and then, life places a circumstance in front of you that forces you to pause.
On a train from Manchester to London one morning in 1990, she came up with the brilliant narrative of Harry Potter while on the voyage.
Unfortunately, her mother died while she was writing the Harry Potter novel, which caused her a great deal of grief and caused the story to be delayed.
In 1992, she relocated to Portugal to teach English. She met a man here, married him, and had a daughter with him. She filed for divorce from him a year later, in 1993.
In three chapters of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling and her daughter approach her sister.
She was at a crossroads in her life, jobless, divorced, and a single mother. It was the most difficult time of her life. Rowling is the type of woman who can always find a way to bring light into a dark situation. As a result, she finishes her Harry Potter book.
Before you succeed, you’ll get a lot of rejections
1995 Rowling completes the book but lacks the financial means to self-publish it, so she contacts 12 major publishing houses, all of which reject the Harry Potter script. But she didn’t give up, and she kept trying various publications until a small press agreed to publish 1000 copies of Harry Potter, and her efforts paid off.
Following that, the book received numerous accolades, including the British Book Award and the Nestle Smarties Book Prize for Children’s Book of the Year.
Harry Potter has sold 500 million copies globally and has been translated into 73 languages as of 2013. Finally, the book was made into a film series, which grossed over a billion dollars.
J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have been translated into 73 languages, sold millions of copies, and made over $20 billion in film adaptations and sponsorships, stated as much. So, why does she acknowledge that she was a failure?
Her book series didn’t come about as easily as scribbling notes on a couple of dinner napkins. It wasn’t a straightforward one-, two-, or even three-step process. Years of dedication would be required to achieve her current level of success.
Rowling began writing shortly after coming up with the idea for Harry Potter but was unexpectedly interrupted by her mother’s death. Rowling took a break from the novel and fell into a severe depression.
She took a job teaching English in Portugal for a year in the hopes of getting out of her funk. Her purpose in traveling abroad was to get away from her problems and, more significantly, to continue working on her book during her time off. She set a goal for herself to finish the first Harry Potter book by the time she returned from her trip to Portugal.
Things did not go as to plan
She not only failed to make headway on her first novel, but she also ended up with a failed marriage and a young daughter she had to raise alone after falling in and out of love.
She returned to nothing. She didn’t have a job, didn’t have a finished product, and had two mouths to feed.
She began work on her book in cafés while her daughter slept, despite her despair and the fact that she was raising a child on her alone and living off limited unemployment benefits.
Despite several disappointments, she found refuge in her passion for writing. She discovered that the little she had was sufficient to make her somewhat content.
She had found herself in the very situation she had feared and discovered that it wasn’t nearly as horrible as she had imagined. There was nothing left to fear, and her work reflected that attitude.
Rowling sent the book to a publisher after finishing the first three chapters, but they promptly passed on the concept.
She forwarded it to a different publication. Her mailbox was overflowing with rejection letters, but she wasn’t deterred.
“Failure means getting rid of the unnecessary. I stopped pretending to myself that I wasn’t who I was and instead focused all of my efforts on completing the single task that mattered to me.”
J.K. Rowling
Rowling began to lose faith in her work after sending her manuscript to 12 different publishers and being rejected by each one.
Finally, the text was read by an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing.
The editor’s 8-year-old daughter did as well. The little girl was enthralled by the first few chapters and wanted her mother to read them to her.
Rowling, on the other hand, was given a warning: she should acquire a day job since she wouldn’t be able to make any money writing children’s novels.
However, after the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, she proved everyone wrong.
J.K. Rowling went through it all from being an unemployed single mother to being one of the best-selling authors in the whole wide world.
But she had undergone a lot of troubles. She had to deal with rejection regularly and was continuously pushing for success. She toiled away at her art before anyone noticed her. This technique, as well as her capacity to fortify oneself against rejection, made her work memorable.
If we look back, the Harry Potter series had made over $400 million in book sales with the most recent film alone crossing $476 million in its opening weekend. It was known that she was the first woman to become a billionaire author and only a small percentage of authors ever make it that far.
Conclusion
Don’t get discouraged if you have a desire or a passion and you keep getting rejected or failing.
If you’re going through a terrible time in your life but working on something you truly believe in, don’t give up.
If you give up, you’ll never know if you could have succeeded or not. Who knows, perhaps you’ll break some records and prove yourself to be the best.
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