Per-word earnings are impossible to calculate at Rowling’s level since her vast wealth includes royalties from merchandise, movie adaptations, and many other revenue streams.

The 2021 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling’s fortune at £820 million, ranking her as the 196th-richest person in the UK. As of 2020, she also owns a £4.5 million Georgian house in Kensington and a £2 million home in Edinburgh.

Rowling was rejected many times before Bloomsbury Children’s Books published the first book in 1997 in what was to become the Potter series. Scholastic bought US rights, retitled and released the work in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Six titles followed achieving wild success.

Her earnings for the Harry Potter series are estimated at about $60-$80 million from book sales alone. Let’s attempt a ridiculous estimate of per-word earnings based on seven Harry Potter books at about 300 pages each or 80,000 words each: $60000000/7=$8,571,438 for each book, divided by 80,000 words=$107.14 per word.

Again, It is impossible to come up with an accurate number.

The focus should not be on price per word, but rather on the concepts behind the series that made the work universally appealing to a specific young audience.

Rowling’s success is based on her exceptional imagination and creativity.

Her 2008 Harvard commencement speech was published in 2015 as an illustrated book, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (Sphere), and sold in aid of Lumos and university-wide financial aid at Harvard.

She now publishes her own work—including adult crime novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith—under her digital company, Wizarding World (formerly Pottermore).

More details about Jo Rowling can be found on her site, Home – J.K. Rowling