A fond look back at Harry

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

EDINBURGH, Scotland — In the five days since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released to worldwide frenzy, J.K. Rowling has helped her 2-year-old daughter set up a new dollhouse, cleaned the fish tank and gone to the grocery store to buy chicken — sure signs she's ready to get back to a normal life.

Or as normal as possible when you're the publishing industry's author of the moment and, with earnings of about $1 billion, probably its richest as well.

Rowling's seven-book fantasy series about a boy wizard has smashed publishing records. Deathly Hallows, the final volume, today enters USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list at No. 1 after selling a record-setting 8.3 million copies in 24 hours last weekend in the USA.

In an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY at a hotel here, the British author says she's sad her Potter series has come to an end, but is excited about two new writing projects she's begun — one for children, one for adults.

Rowling, 41, believes her Potter books will be read for years to come — "Do I think they'll last? Honestly, yes" — but she has no illusions about duplicating their success.

"Of course I won't write anything as popular as this again," Rowling says. "But I have truthfully known that since 1999, when the thing began to become a little bit insane. So I've had a good long time to know that, and I accept it."

So Rowling is ready to move on, but not before taking a jab at those who posted spoilers on the Internet just days before Hallows was published. Digital photos of every page of the book were put on the Web by an unknown party.

"I felt angry," she says, her voice getting louder as she talks about it. "I knew it was about other people's egos." She says she was concerned for her young fans, the "10- and 11-year-olds who really wanted not to know" how the book ended until they'd had a chance to read it.
Two days before Hallows' publication at midnight last Friday, Rowling says, she was alarmed by how prevalent the spoilers had become on the Internet. She likened it to watching a massive dam spring several leaks. It was inevitable, perhaps, with a book of worldwide interest being published in the Internet age, but upsetting nonetheless.

"The (leak of the) epilogue upset me most," she said. "I had been working toward that point for a long time. I did have a sense-of-humor failure when the epilogue went up."
Despite her fierce protectiveness of the final Potter installment last week (she also lashed out at The New York Times after it ran an early review), Rowling is now eager to talk about what happens to Harry.

Read the rest here, http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2007-07-25-jk-rowling_N.htm