Harry Potter her publishers to adopt a more gender-neutral pen name in order to appeal to the male members of this age group, fearing that they would not be interested in reading a novel they knew to be written by a woman. She elected to use J. K. Rowling (Joanne Kathleen Rowling), using her grandmother's name as her second name because she has no middle name. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was published by Bloomsbury, the publisher of all "Harry Potter" books in the United Kingdom, on 26 June 1997. It was released in the United States on 1 September 1998
Harry Potter audience. In December 2005, Rowling stated on her web site, "2006 will be the year when I write the final book in the "Harry Potter" series." Updates then followed in her online diary chronicling the progress of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", with the release date of 21 July 2007. The book itself was finished on 11 January 2007 in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, where she scrawled a message on the back of a bust of Hermes. It read: "J. K. Rowling finished writing "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in this room (552) on 11 January 2007." Rowling