Elizabeth Svendsen started selling books online in 2003, about the time her first book, “The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter,” a collaboration with her father, Allan Zola Kronzek, was published by Random House. Svendsen was credited using her maiden name, Elizabeth Kronzek.
The book made No. 10 on the New York Times best-sellers list and stayed there for three weeks.
Random House also published second and third editions of the book, which has been reprinted into numerous foreign languages and published under different companies.
Svendsen said that owning a bookstore wasn’t her main focus. “I hadn’t expected it to be something I would do as a living, just something that would have been very fun to do,” she said. “When I was little, I always used to visit used bookstores, and that is where the passion started for me.”
The New York City native turned that passion into a career. She started freelance writing in 2001, tackling academic subjects for various medical and business journals.
The process of publishing a book was very hard, she said. “Luckily, right after college I began working for a literary agency in New York, so I already knew some people,” Svendsen said. Svendsen and her father wrote six sample chapters for the book and then moved on to a query letter to the agent. It took only two tries before Svendsen’s book was accepted by a literary agent and sent off to Random House. “The company wanted the book done in six months. It was very intense; I lived and breathed work for 12 hours, seven days a week.”
After 2010, when the final edition of “The Sorcerer’s Companion” was published, Svendsen decided that she would sell her first bookstore, Blue Jacket Books, to Lawrence Hammar, a customer of Blue Jacket Books and anthropology professor at Wittenberg University, in order to further her focus on specialty books. Blue Jacket Books was sold in the fall of 2011, and from there, Svendsen started Walkabout Books. All of her rare books were obtained from other dealers, estate sales and auctions.
Walkabout Books is at 31 E. Main St. in Xenia. For store information, call (937) 376-5722.
All three editions of “The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter” are available online and at local bookstores.
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