Pre-order demand has seen a locally written and published book bring forward its release date.
Queen of Muck was scheduled to come out in February next year, but was instead released yesterday, in time to make it under the tree for any young readers!
Isaac Thackray talks to Jesse Mulligan about his first book for children and why it's become so popular.
Photo: supplied
He says the idea came from his own two daughters.
“Girls read a lot of books; they inhale them really. We quickly ran out of good books that were funny, entertaining, exciting, and with girls doing exciting things – there seemed to be a bit of a lack there.
“We got to the library and get 35 books out at a time.”
Thackray has been an advertising writer for 25 years which gave him a bit of a head start, along with reading a lot of children’s books with his kids.
“I thought I could at least do as good as they could.”
However, it turned out to be a lot harder than he thought it would be.
“It was so much more work and time than I ever thought. We’re coming up to three years that I started writing it. If you want to get it to a publishable standard, the process is really long, and you’ve got to be quite a masochist really.”
Writing is one thing, but finding an illustrator, designer and publisher is another all together.
“They’re all tough jobs in their own right really.”
His kids were a major part of the editing process.
“When I had draft chapters, I’d take them to bed and read them to the girls and if I didn’t get the reaction I was looking for, I’d put a mark beside it and go back and work on it the next day.”
The explosion in popularity came as quite a surprise for Thackray.
“I didn’t really tell anyone apart from family and a few friends that I was doing it. We announced it on Facebook one night and the interest was massive. When the presales started, it sold 50 within a couple of hours which, for an unknown book from a nobody, that’s pretty amazing.”
He explains the book is about two girls who are trying to find their granddad who’s gone missing.
“He turns out to be somewhere they never expect. There’s a baddie involved, quite an entertaining baddie and a few other funny characters – lots of adventure and the girls are in the middle of all of it.”
The book has made its way into the hands of reviewers and they’re so far positive. There’s already a possibility of a reprint on the way.
“The publisher and I have been talking this morning about that. It’s quite hard to know when to reprint because transit is so crazy at the moment and the books come from China.”
The book is slowly making its way into bookshops and is available at queenofmuck.com.
