Journalist Lizo Mzimba of BBC has released a couple of new statements today regarding the reveal of J.K. Rowling as the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  The statements come from J.K. and Russells Solicitors (an entertainment industry law firm.) It was revealed today via The Evening Standard that the leak of Robert Galbraith’s true identity occurred because someone had loose lips.  In short, a Partner at the firm revealed to his wife’s friend, Judith Callegari, that J.K. was the author and she tweeted to someone who had said they enjoyed the book – read that full story here.

Since the news broke the publisher of the book, Mulholland Books, announced that it will have a second edition print of 300,000 copies.  J.K. Rowling also revealed through her Official Site that the book is indeed part of a series.

From Rowling: “I have today discovered how the leak about Robert’s true identity occurred…A tiny number of people knew my pseudonym and it has not been pleasant to wonder for days how a woman whom I had never heard of… prior to Sunday night could have found out something that many of my oldest friends did not know…To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I had assumed that I could expect total confidentiality from Russells…a reputable professional firm, and I feel very angry that my trust turned out to be misplaced.”

From Russells Solicitors: “We, Russells Solicitors, apologise unreservedly for the disclosure…caused by one of our Partners, Chris Gossage, in revealing to his wife’s best friend, Judith Callegari, during a private conversation that the true identity of Robert Galbraith was in fact JK Rowling. Whilst accepting his own culpability, the disclosure…was made in confidence to someone he trusted implicitly. On becoming aware of the circumstances, we immediately notified JK Rowling’s…agent. We can confirm that this leak was not part of any marketing plan and that neither JK Rowling…her agent nor publishers were in any way involved”

Thanks Mugglenet!

Bloomsbury is releasing a new boxed set: Harry Potter: The magical adventure begins . . . Volumes 1-3 on October 10th for £21 (it is £18.90 on Bloomsbury’s website.) It looks like they are brand new covers, but the actual covers have not been released as of this moment. Don’t forget about the new adult editions of the books that are available in the UK as of today!

They describe the set as:

Every great story has a great beginning – and this is where Harry Potter’s extraordinary, magical adventure starts. From the moment Harry Potter is deposited on the doorstep of number four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, with a swish of Albus Dumbledore’s cloak and the words ‘Good luck, Harry’, J.K. Rowling’s irresistible storytelling magic pulls readers into an unforgettable adventure. Harry Potter is a milestone in every child’s reading life and this gorgeous, collectable boxed set is the perfect introduction for new readers, wizard and Muggle alike.

Contains Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. These new paperback editions are exclusively available in this boxed set.

Thanks to SS for the tip!

The final nominations for the 2013 Teen Choice Awards have been announced and Emma is up for a couple awards!  Fans ages 13-19 can vote once each day per category for their favorite TEEN CHOICE 2013 nominees at the Teen Choice website. Voting ends at 11:59 PM PT on Saturday, Aug. 10 and the show airs Sunday, August 11th, on Fox.

Choice Movie: Liplock
Amy Adams and Henry Cavill, “Man of Steel”
Skylar Astin and Anna Kendrick, “Pitch Perfect”
Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert, “Beautiful Creatures”
Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, “The Perks of Being A Wallflower”
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2”

Candie’s Choice Style Icon
Miley Cyrus
Ariana Grande
Demi Lovato
Lea Michele
Emma Watson

In a new interview with the Evening Standard, Harry Potter alum Katie Leung talked about what her life and career has been like since the series was completed. As we posted a couple weeks ago, Katie is set to star in a new short film by Daniel and Ateh Jewel called Sun Never Sets. The film is being funded by Kickstarter so they need everyone’s help to raise enough money (£25,000) to be able to film.

She is also currently starring in Run, a mini-series on Channel 4, which was originally going to air in March but instead started last night and continues until Thursday. Katie plays Ying, “a Chinese illegal immigrant selling DVDs to try to free herself from the vicious gang-master who brought her to Britain.”

She discusses Run in the interview:

The series [Run], […] starts [Monday] on Channel 4 and there is definitely no magic in Leung’s storyline. It is a gritty portrait of modern Britain, part of which involves Leung’s character being raped. “It’s difficult to watch, but I felt to give justice to the character it was needed and I was more than happy to do it,” she says. […] Run, she thought, “was a great script”. The physical challenge was the greatest, however as “I literally had to run quite a bit. There’s a scene where I’m running from the immigration officers and I pulled a muscle in my leg on the first day of shooting.”

She also talks about Harry Potter and her more recent roles:

“It hasn’t been a conscious decision to step away from Potter.” Leung’s last major role was on stage in a production of Wild Swans at the Young Vic last year. “I’m just lucky that projects I’ve had the chance to do have been away from it all and have been quite challenging roles.”

Leung first got the role in Harry Potter at an open casting when she was 16 years old. She and her father travelled to London together “with no expectations at all” but the director Mike Newell clearly saw something in her. “He asked me where I had trained and I said I hadn’t done any form of acting before. When I saw the surprise on his face, I thought, ‘maybe’.”

Finally she talked about her future and the difficulties with picking the right roles:

[…] “People had expectations that I would go on and do bigger and better things, which is pretty impossible if Potter is your first thing.” Leung briefly considered quitting acting but is now studying drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. There are more acting projects in the pipeline but Leung has to filter out the rubbish. “There have been quite a few things that I’ve had to say no to. It mainly involves nudity where it hasn’t been required. I’m quite a prude in that sense. I’m up for it if it’s going to be an epic script and it’s needed — like the rape scene in Run.”

Scripts can also be harder to come by because of her race, says Leung. “Because I’m Chinese I don’t get five scripts a day to read. That’s a limitation in itself. In a way we’re lucky, though, because there are fewer of us so we have more of a chance of getting the roles.”

J.K. Rowling has updated her official website to comment on how she was ousted as the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  For fans who are unaware, news broke over the weekend that she published the book back in April under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Since that time the book has sold out in most online stores and there are long wait lists at libraries. The book has been spotted on eBay already for over $300!  Yesterday I purchased the book on half.com for just under $20, but now the cheapest one on there is $26, followed by $60.  The publishing companies are issuing reprint of the book which will carry a revised author biography, which reads ‘Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. So try to get a first edition because they are sure to be rare in the future!

“I hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience! It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name. The upside of being rumbled is that I can publicly thank my editor David Shelley, who has been a true partner in crime, all those people at Little, Brown who have been working so hard on The Cuckoo’s Calling without realising that I wrote it, and the writers and reviewers, both in the newspapers and online, who have been so generous to the novel.  And to those who have asked for a sequel, Robert fully intends to keep writing the series, although he will probably continue to turn down personal appearances.”

The Sunday Times is reporting that back in April, J.K. Rowling published a new novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Thanks to The New York Times, those of us without Sunday Times subscriptions can hear the story.  According to the article Rowling said:  “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.”

The books description, from Amazon, states:

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide.
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.

The story of the unmasking of Rowling is as follows:

The story of how The Sunday Times uncovered the truth is an odd one that involves, as seems so often the case these days, Twitter. It started on Thursday, said Richard Brooks, the paper’s arts editor, after one of his colleagues happened to post a tweet mentioning that she had loved “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” and that it did not seem as if the book had been written by a novice.

“After midnight she got a tweet back from an anonymous person saying it’s not a first-time novel — it was written by J. K. Rowling,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “So my colleague tweeted back and said, ‘How do you know for sure?’  ” The person replied, “I just know,” and then proceeded to delete all his (or her) tweets and to close down the Twitter account, Mr. Brooks said. “All traces of this person had been taken off, and we couldn’t find his name again.”

[…]

First he did some Internet detective work, finding many similarities between “The Casual Vacancy” and “The Cuckoo’s Calling.” Both books shared the same agent, publisher and editor in Britain, for example. It seemed particularly odd, he said, that the editor, David Shelley, would be in charge of both someone as important as J. K. Rowling — a very big job, indeed — and someone as seemingly unimportant as Robert Galbraith.

He then started reading the book. “I said, ‘Nobody who was in the Army and now works in civilian security could write a book as good as this,’ ” he said. Next, he sent copies of “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” “The Casual Vacancy” and the last Harry Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” to a pair of computer linguistic experts, who found significant similarities among them.

[…]

“I [Mr Brooks] e-mailed a blunt question: ‘I believe that Robert Galbraith is in fact J. K. Rowling, and will you please come back with a straightforward answer?’ ” he related. On Saturday morning, he said he received a response from a Rowling spokeswoman, who said that she had “decided to ’fess up.’ ”

Ms. Rowling now stands to make a lot of money from this new book, and so do the publishers. One interesting aspect of the whole story is how Little, Brown essentially colluded in keeping a secret that caused it, at least until now, to forgo possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

In a short statement released on Sunday, Reagan Arthur, Little, Brown’s publisher, said that the company was “pleased and proud” of “The Cuckoo’s Calling.” “A reprint of the book is under way and will carry a revised author biography, which reads ‘Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling,’ ” she said. The company said it planned to publish a second book in what looks set to be a series by Mr. Galbraith, a k a Ms. Rowling, next summer.