J.K. Rowling has pulled a fast one on the publishing world - having her crime novel
The Cuckoo's Calling
published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. I don't recall seeing this book on any of the Summer Lists in
my previous post.
We know Rowling loves a good joke, and this one is worthy of the Weasley Twins. The cover reminds me of Dumbledore on Privet Drive turning out the street lights. The name of her detective, Cormoran Strike, sounds suspiciously like Severus Snape!
I guess you should order soon if you want Galbraith's name on the cover! The price has come down on
Amazon from $20 to $16.90 just in the past 24 hours - if you want the real paper book that is. On Kindle it's $9.99.
NY Daily News
A detective novel secretly written by J.K. Rowling surged to the top of bestseller lists on Monday after the true identity of the author was revealed, embarrassing some publishers who had rejected the manuscript.
Rowling, whose Harry Potter series made her Britain's best-selling author, posed as a retired military policeman called Robert Galbraith to write "The Cuckoo's Calling", only to see her cover blown at the weekend by a Sunday newspaper.
The novel had only sold 1,500 hardback copies since being published in April. But by Monday it had raced to the top of Amazon.co.uk's best-selling list, leaving high street and online book merchants unable to slake demand.
"For a title that isn't even in our top 5,000 to shoot to number one so quickly is almost unheard of," Darren Hardy, books manager at Amazon.co.uk, told Reuters by email.
Hardy said this meteoric rise in sales meant "The Cuckoo's Calling" has established itself as a contender to become one of the biggest-selling books of the summer.
Editor Admits Rejecting Secret Novel
Kate Mills, fiction editor at Orion Publishing, came forward to admit that she had unwittingly turned down the new Rowling work, and suggested that colleagues at other publishers had done the same.
She told The Independent: “I thought it was well-written but quiet. It didn’t stand out for me and new crime novels are hard to launch right now.” Asked if she regretted revealing she had passed on the book, Ms Mills said: “No, it’s out there. You’ve got to love a book to take it on. It wasn’t for me.”
. . . The Cuckoo’s Calling follows private investigator Cormoran Strike, who is brought in to investigate when a model falls to her death from a Mayfair balcony. It received praise from crime writers including Ms McDermid, Mark Billingham and Alex Gray.
Ms McDermid said she was “gobsmacked” to find out the truth, bursting out laughing on Saturday when she was told. “It never crossed my mind at all. Nobody had any suspicion. The fake biog is very plausible.”
Ms McDermid had even asked for Robert Galbraith to join her Theakstons Crime New Blood panel, only to be told he would be away on holiday for the summer.
From Forbes
Once more, J.K. Rowling has a hit on her hands, as Robert Galbraith follows Richard Bachman with ‘cancer of the pseudonym’ and ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ becomes a best-seller.
An interesting experiment has been unfortunately curtailed, and we’ll never know just how successful Galbraith’s detective series would have been. Now that the true author has been outed, the series is going to be a guaranteed hit. But it was already on course to do just that. As a debut novel the 1500 hardback copies shipped, with around 500 sales, was an impressive number given the circumstances of a saturated genre, a debut author, and little marketing spend behind the title. Rowling more than likely had another hit series on her head as Galbraith, and it would have been delightful to get to book three or four in the series, a potential movie deal in place, Patterson Joseph cast as Cormoran Strike, and then do the reveal.
