This may belong in IMHO. I’m curious what you think of this–are you pleased for her? Disgusted? Amused?
For myself, I’d wish that Ursula Le Guin’s wizard books would bring her anything like this total.
Well, good for her.
I bet the guy who divorced her is kicking himself.
She divorced him.
I think it highly unlikely she really got that much money - these kinds of things tend to be exaggerated - but there’s no guarantees that after the HP phenomenon dies down that she’d have any kind of success with the books she writes afterward, so she’s definitely got her retirement fund set up.
More power to her!
Good for her.
She works hard, can write well, and has earned it.
Unfortunately she lives in England, so after taxes it’s only $32,492 (US).
I don’t have the slightest problem with her earnings. I personally gave her enough money through book purchases & her movie percentages to buy a large Coke at her neighborhood convenience store, and it was some of the best money I spent all year. (OTOH, I feel that George Lucas owes me a refund.)
Okay, that was funny! And hopefully, not completely true.
I’m happy for her, but I was actually wondering, too, how much of it she gets to keep.
Anyway, it’s better than being nearly homeless, and I’m happy that she pulled herself out of it.
I liked what one British comedienne (I don’t know her name) said: “The two women with the highest incomes in the United Kingdom are the queen and J.K. Rowling. One is a veteran of a publicly funded housing and publicly funded childcare welfare state that’s bankrupting England, and the other wrote Harry Potter.”
I thought she lived in Scotland. And I am curious about how much tax she’d pay on $77,000,000 US.
Shoshana, she used to live in Edinburgh but now has a house in England.
If she never wrote another word, she’d still be set up for life. Royalties and residuals from the movies plus the money she has already received mean she is sitting sweet. Good on her. I wouldn’t want that kind of money and fame myself. Well, I’d like the $ but I cannot imagine what it would be like to write a book and have this happen. It’s not happened quite like this for any other children’s writer ever.
I say “good on her”, too. 
A precise figure is difficult to give, not least because she presumably uses the services of the very best tax lawyers, but the higher rate for UK income taxes is 40%, so a back-of-the-envelope calculation would be $30.8 million.
Unsurprisingly, given her income, she reportedly owns property in England and in Scotland.
So, am I pleased for her? No real view either way. Disgusted? Don’t see why. Amused? Not particularly. No, my main reaction is that, as a UK taxpayer and as someone who has never knowingly contributed to her millions, I reckon I’m a net beneficiary on her tax bill.
Well, I don’t think she’s a particularly good writer - though I don’t make a habit of reading children’s books so maybe she’s a giant of the genre and I’m just missing something - but she has gotten alot of kids interested in reading. She at least deserves applause for that.
Go Rowling. She wrote an awfully good series of books that’s given me enormous amusement, and she deserves her share of the profits. I hope she has a good accountant helping her manage all this money so she’ll never have to work again if she doesn’t want to.
And despite the money, and the fact that she doesn’t really, financially speaking, have to write another word, if she doesn’t get me the fifth book soon, something bad is going to happen.
I have no interest at all in Harry Potter, but I’ll say the same thing that I do when people biatch about, say, Alex Rodriguez making $25 million a year to play baseball:
You’re only worth what someone will pay you.
More power to her. And the minute Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is published, I intend to add something to that 77 mill ASAP. I love those books.
Regards,
Shodan
77 million?
Is that all?!?!
Why would anyone be disgusted that someone made a bunch of money? I don’t get it.
TaxGuy, it is pure jealousy. The complainers are upset it was someone else and not them with the dough.
I am with the rest of you. Good for her. She is one of the lucky writers that actually got published and is making a great living at it.
Cisco
technically she’s not all that good. The last one in particular could do with a thorough edit and some sorting out of plotting issues. IMO there’s far better writers out there than her – Diana Wynne Jones, Margaret Mahy but for some reason Rowling has been the one who has hit the motherlode in terms of public interest. Which is a fine and groovy thing for her and Bloomsbury’s marketing dept :).