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So I promised every tenth comic would be long. I didn’t think they’d be this long, though.

This of course refers to how J.K. Rowling pseudonymously wrote a book called The Cuckoo’s Calling under the name Robert Galbraith. She claimed she wanted to do so because she “was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback.”

She had already tried once to release a book unrelated to the Harry Potter series with her adult novel The Casual Vacancy, but of course she couldn’t escape comparisons to her previous work and complaints about not living up to whatever people expected.

In releasing The Cuckoo’s Calling pseudonymously, with even the publisher who accepted it not knowing that it wasn’t really by a man named Robert Galbraith, Rowling got to prove that she really could do this, that it wasn’t a fluke, that everything else she does isn’t just riding on her own coattails. But the book didn’t sell fantastically–it sold better than she’d expected, but there was no huge explosion until the real author was revealed.

She wishes she hadn’t had to admit she is Robert Galbraith. I guess even being one of the biggest authors ever has its drawbacks.