It turns out that J.K. Rowling has written two adult novels since she closed the curtain on Harry Potter. There’s The Casual Vacancy, which became an instant bestseller thanks to the publicity and her name on the cover. But the British author also tried her hand at writing a crime novel with The Cuckoo’s Calling. It didn’t sell too many copies because it was written under a pseudonym. Since revealing that she was Robert Galbraith, the novel’s sales have spiked and a second printing will be needed.

Rowling revealed that she was Galbraith to The Sunday Times over the weekend. According to The New York Times, the book had only sold 1,500 in the U.K. before this weekend, even though it had earned rave reviews.

“Galbraith combines a complex and compelling sleuth and an equally well-formed and unlikely assistant with a baffling crime in his stellar debut,” Publishers Weekly wrote in its review in February.

According to The Wall Street Journal, on Sunday, the book was No. 1 on Barnes & Noble’s website and Amazon.com. Both sites were out of copies and Amazon is still out of stock.

Mulholland Books, which published the book in the U.S., said that it is already working on reprinting the novel. It will carry Rowling’s name this time. The Cuckoo’s Calling is also going to be followed by a sequel next summer.

So how did Rowling end up having to reveal that she was Galbraith? Sunday Times art editor Richard Brooks told the NY Times that it started with a tweet he received from someone who said that Rowling was Galbraith. “So my colleague tweeted back and said, ‘How do you know for sure?’”

The person just said “I just know” and then disappeared from Twitter. So Brooks did some research himself and started reading. “I said, ‘Nobody who was in the Army and now works in civilian security could write a book as good as this.”

He then had the last Harry Potter book, The Casual Vacancy and Cuckoo’s Calling analyzed and linguistics experts found similarities. He contacted Rowling’s rep and she decided to give it up.

“I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” Rowling told the Sunday Times. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”

image: Amazon