From Single Mom on Welfare to Multi-Million Dollar Author

I love rags to riches stories! It’s encouraging to know that some of the most successful people were not always rich and famous. Many of them came from poverty or faced difficult circumstances and managed to overcome disparity and follow their dreams. I admire people that found a way to push through disappointment & failure and kept going because they believed in themselves and eventually created a life that mirrored their ambition.

J.K Rowling is one of the richest & well-known authors in the world. She is best known for the Harry Potter books, but she struggled for years before becoming the powerhouse writer behind one of the most famous book and movie series of all time.

Born in the UK in 1965, she always had wanted to be a writer. Her parents encouraged her to study French at the University of Exeter, which she later regretted because she wanted to study English. In 1990 she came up with the idea of Harry Potter, it was also the same year tragedy struck & her mother died. Going through that devastated her.

She worked as an English teacher in Portugal and met her first husband and had a child, but a couple of years later they split up and she was thrown out of the house. By 1992 she was still working on the first book and was surviving on state benefits as a single mother. She would write while her daughter took naps, eventually she finished her first copy of Philosopher’s Stone and sent it out for publishing, but it was rejected not once or twice but by 12 major publishing houses.

She didn’t give up because she believed in herself and her work, and she found a small publisher named Bloomsbury to publish her work.

Even after getting a publisher to take her on, she was advised to keep teaching because writers of children’s books don’t get paid very well. By 1996 a few weeks after publication, book sales started to take off. She received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council so that she could write full-time, and Scholastic paid her £100,000 for the rights to publish in America and in 1998 Warner Brothers secured the film rights for the books and paid her a seven-figure sum.

It took about 6 years from the time she started the book until the book actually got published. Her mother died, her marriage fell apart and she became a single mother living on welfare but she kept pushing toward her goal and believing in herself even with so many things going wrong in her life. She pushed through each rejection and didn’t give up because she believed in herself and eventually became successful way beyond her wildest dreams.

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