In 1990, before the rise of Second Life and World of Warcraft, before the triumph of MMORPGs, a young woman named Joanne Rowling was stuck on a delayed four-hour train ride to King's Cross station in London. She began to conjure up an outcast boy heading to a sorcery school called Hogwarts. Seven years and countless drafts later, the first Harry Potter novel plunged readers into a parallel univers
e more compelling and enveloping than any online world imaginable. Today she is the first person on the planet to become a billionaire by writing books. And when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume in the series, apparates on July 21, it will mark the conclusion of an incredible run: more than 325 million books sold in 200 countries, not to mention the $3 billion or so earned by the first four movies and billions more from games, action figures, and product tie-ins. Rowling is the reigning master of what you might call MMFWs — massively multireader fictional worlds — inspiring a generation of screen-fed kids to devour old-fashioned books on paper. The 2007 Rave Awards
04.24.07
Business: The Mogul
J. Rowling | Harry Potter, Inc. Today, on the 1st novembre 2012, I'm going to call this HPFW Harry Potter's Fictional Worlds, owing to the name of my brand new research paper for University of L'Aquila.
