The stakes seemed to have gone up a lot, and I attracted a lot of publicity in Britain for which I was utterly unprepared. Once Harry appeared on the US market in 1998, Rowling became an international celebrity. Following the runaway success of the first Harry Potter book, US publishers launched a bidding war involving six-figure dollar amounts for the rights to bring the Harry Potter novels stateside ( source). Rowling was in the middle of writing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when the first Harry Potter novel ( Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone) came out in Britain in 1997. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets IntroductionĪuthor J.K.
