JK Rowling was outed this morning as Robert Galbraith, the pseudonym credited as the author of The Cuckoo's Calling, a well-regarded mystery novel released in April.
The Sunday Times of London unmasked Rowling after receiving an anonymous tip on Twitter. A writer for the paper tweeted that she thought the book was fantastic, but did not think it seemed like an author's first outing. An anonymous user tweeted back that Rowling was actually the author, then quickly deleted the account.
The biography for Galbraith (which acknowledged the name was a pseudonym) claimed that the author was a married father of two with an army background and experience in civilian security.
As the Sunday Times began investigating, the paper noticed that Rowling and Galbraith shared many similarities — the same editor, the same agent, the same publisher, and comparable writing styles.
Although the revelation has led to a surge in sales — the novel had sold only 1,500 copies before today and has now shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list (a 507,000 % increase) — Rowling said she enjoyed the anonymity.
“I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” she said in a statement. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”
And it seems most in the industry were kept in the dark — Kate Mills, a fiction editor at Orion Books, tweeted this morning that she had turned down the novel.
[NYT, photo via AP]