The story of the young wizard Harry Potter has become a classic brand, making its author a fortune.

J.K. Rowling, the creator of the “Harry Potter” series, is considered the first person to become a billionaire through writing. The creation of the Harry Potter saga completely transformed Rowling’s life.

Born in Scotland, Rowling developed a passion for literature from a young age. In a 1998 interview, she shared: “I’m sure the first story I wrote when I was five or six was about a rabbit named Rabbit. He had measles and his friends came to visit him, including a giant bee named Miss Bee. And from Rabbit and Miss Bee, I wanted to be a writer, although I rarely told anyone.”

Her parents married when they were 20 and neither attended university. Her father was an aircraft engineer at Rolls Royce, and her mother was a science technician at a high school.

Coming from a background of poverty and without a college education, her parents viewed Rowling’s rich imagination as a flaw.

In 1990, while on a train from Manchester to King’s Cross station in London, Rowling conceived the idea for “Harry Potter.” Over the next five years, she outlined plans for seven books in the series, writing them by hand and filling numerous notebooks.

In 1991, at the age of 25, Rowling faced the pain of losing her mother to a serious illness, just before her book was published.

At 26, she moved to Portugal to teach English. There, she married and had a daughter named Jessica. She divorced her first husband in 1993.

During this time, she continued to work on the book about a boy who discovers he is a wizard and is sent to a magical school. Upon returning to England, Rowling said she had “half a suitcase full of notes about Harry Potter.”

At this point, she was unemployed and could only write in a café with Jessica sleeping in a stroller beside her.

Rowling lived on social benefits and government welfare. She admitted that without the benefits, she would have been so poor that she might have ended up homeless and unable to finish the book.

“At twenty, my circumstances were terrible, and I was really down,” Rowling recalled. She had experienced depression and had considered suicide due to the harshness and dead ends in her life.

In 1995, Rowling completed the first “Harry Potter” book. She sent it to twelve publishers but faced outright rejections.

A year later, Bloomsbury Publishing accepted Rowling’s manuscript after the publisher’s 9-year-old daughter loved the book.

By March 1999, 300,000 copies of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” had been sold in the UK. The book won several awards, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, voted on by both adults and children.

In the U.S., Rowling sold the book to Scholastic for over $100,000, a record-breaking amount at the time. This lucrative advance allowed her to buy her own apartment.

In 1998, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” the second book in the series, also achieved significant sales in the UK. That same year, Rowling announced a seven-figure deal with Warner Bros to adapt the books into films.

Not only did the novels become a global sensation, but the Harry Potter film series also achieved immense success. By the end of the film series with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” in 2011, it was the highest-grossing film series of all time.

In 2007, the final book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” became the best-selling book of all time. In total, the seven books have sold over 450 million copies and been translated into 67 languages.

Beyond writing Harry Potter, Rowling has earned a massive income from the brand through films, games, merchandise, and theme parks.

In 2004, Forbes included Rowling in their billionaire list for the first time. However, she remarked: “I have more money than I ever dreamed of, but I am not a billionaire.”

According to Headspacegroup, J.K. Rowling is ranked 7th among the 10 wealthiest entrepreneurs in the UK, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

More than a decade after its debut, the Harry Potter brand remains as popular as ever. It is estimated that Rowling still earns between $50 million and $100 million annually from royalties.