five hundred copies. That book, which barely made it to the public, was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.fn1 You know the rest of the story. Today, there are hundreds of millions of Harry Potter books in print worldwide. How did publishers get it so wrong? Eight experts in children’s publishing turned Harry Potter down – and the ninth, Newton, only printed five hundred copies. But Alice, an eight-year-old, knew right away that it was “so much better than anything else.”
