Stephen King did this for a few of his books as 'Richard Bachman' [1], although they did better than Rowling's by an order of magnitude, they also sold an order of magnitude worse than a real Stephen King book. Thinner selling 25,000 copies sounds pretty impressive for an 'unknown' author, suggesting King at least has some sort of repeatable mass-market appeal.
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Stephen King did this for a few of his books as 'Richard Bachman' [1], although they did better than Rowling's by an order of magnitude, they also sold an order of magnitude worse than a real Stephen King book. Thinner selling 25,000 copies sounds pretty impressive for an 'unknown' author, suggesting King at least has some sort of repeatable mass-market appeal.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman