Rowling Solves Some Mysteries About Her Mystery

Nearly everything about the publication of “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a detective novel released by Little, Brown & Company in April, has been a little mysterious.

Its real author, it was revealed last week, was not Robert Galbraith, as the publisher originally claimed, but J. K. Rowling. But that disclosure only led to an additional flurry of questions: Why had Ms. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series made her famous, wealthy and widely admired, written a book under a pseudonym? Who had apparently unmasked her against her will? And was it, as the cynics muttered, all a clever marketing ploy to juice sales?

Some of those questions, to the relief of Ms. Rowling’s fans, have now been answered.

Ms. Rowling, never a prolific giver of interviews, has elaborated at unusual length in a new post on a Web site devoted to her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith.

The name she chose to write under, Ms. Rowling explained, is a mash-up of one of her heroes, Robert F. Kennedy, and a fantasy name, Ella Galbraith, that she chose for herself as a girl.

Ms. Rowling wrote the book under a man’s name, she said, to take her writing persona “as far away as possible” from herself. She said she remembered too late that the renowned American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006, shared her initials, and feared that might serve as a clue to her own identity.

To research “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” she interviewed members of the military, both active and retired. Choosing to identify Robert Galbraith as a former military man in his biography, she explained, was the “easiest and most plausible reason” for him to know the inner workings of the Special Investigation Branch, a major element of the book.

She said she intended to continue writing the series as Robert Galbraith, and that she had just finished a sequel that will probably be published next year.

Ms. Rowling posted the answers on the Web site only days after it was revealed that her London law firm, Russells, was the source of the leak of her identity. In a statement last Thursday, the firm said one of its partners, Chris Gossage, had told his wife’s best friend, Judith Callegari, that Ms. Rowling had written the book. Ms. Callegari, for reasons that were not explained, then tipped off a columnist at The Sunday Times of London via Twitter. The Sunday Times identified Ms. Rowling as the author in a front-page story on July 14.

Since then, Little, Brown has rushed to reprint hardcover copies of “The Cuckoo’s Calling” and get them to bookstores. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, said on Wednesday that the publisher had gone to press four times and had 390,000 copies in print. Until Ms. Rowling emerged as the real author of the book, it had sold only about 500 copies in hardcover in the United States.

Several bookstores said they received fresh copies of the book earlier this week and were giving it prominent display space. Ms. Rowling’s first novel for adults, “The Casual Vacancy,” went on sale in paperback on Tuesday.

On the Robert Galbraith Web site, Ms. Rowling reiterated that having her identity revealed so quickly was not her intention.

“If anyone had seen the labyrinthine plans I laid to conceal my identity (or indeed my expression when I realized that the game was up!)” Ms. Rowling said, “they would realize how little I wanted to be discovered. I hoped to keep the secret as long as possible.”