That's not true. In the brief four months between being published and the author being revealed as a pseudonym it sold a respectable number of copies (8,500 acr

That's not true. In the brief four months between being published and the author being revealed as a pseudonym it sold a respectable number of copies (8,500 across all formats - that doesn't sound like a lot, but it was at the time only published in the UK, and for a hardback book that is actually a large amount). By publishing industry standards it was commercially successful. JK Rowling herself has said the number of copies the book sold in its first three months corresponds fairly well to the number of books she sold under her own name when she was initially published.