In 1990, JK Rowling was on a crowded train from Manchester to London when suddenly the idea of ​​Harry "fell into her head". Rowling recounts the experience on her website, saying:[10]I've been writing almost continuously since the age of six, but I've never been so enthusiastic about an idea before. I just sat and thought, for four hours (delayed train), and all the details resurfaced in my brain, and this skinny, black-haired, glasses-wearing boy who didn't know he was a magician became more and more real to me. In 1995, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was completed and the manuscript was sent to potential agents. The second agent she tried, Christopher Little, offered to represent her and sent the manuscript to Bloomsbury. After eight other publishers had rejected Philosopher's Stone, Bloomsbury offered Rowling an advance of £2,500 for its publication. Although Rowling said she had no particular age group in mind when she began writing the Harry Potter books, publishers initially targeted them at children aged nine to eleven.[12] On the eve of publication, her publishers asked Joanne Rowling to adopt a more gender-neutral pseudonym, so as to appeal to male members of this age group, fearing that they would not be interested in reading a novel they were familiar with. be written by a woman. She chose to use JK Rowling (Joanne Kathleen Rowling), using her grandmother's name as her middle name, because she does not have a middle name.[13]The first Harry Potter book was published in the UK by Bloomsbury in July 1997 and in the United States by Scholastic in September 1998, but not before Rowling received $105,000 for the American rights – an unprecedented sum for a children's book by a then-unknown author.[14] Fearing that American readers would not associate the word "philosopher" with a magical theme (since the Philosopher's Stone is related to alchemy), Scholastic insisted that the book be given the title Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the American market. able to capitalize on this buzz with rapid, successive releases of the first four books that allowed neither Rowling's audience enthusiasm nor interest to wane as she took a break from writing between the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and also quickly established a loyal audience.