Jacqueline Wilson would prefer to be known in the U.S. as something other than England's best-kept secret.
A literary phenomenon at home, she crossed the Atlantic a decade ago, before the British invasion that catapulted Rowling, Rennison and Pullman to U.S. bestseller lists, but has had markedly less success. “Just because you're big in one country doesn't mean you're going to be big in another,” she says, “but I'm very fond of America and I've always hoped the books would find their way there.”
Now Wilson has jumped ship, leaving Random House, her U.S. publisher, for the boutique appeal of Roaring Brook, whose publisher, Simon Boughton, has promised to build the franchise around her. Wilson's debut Roaring Brook title, Candyfloss, will publish in September with a 100,000-copy first printing. A second middle-grade novel, Best Friends, is scheduled for spring '08.
Can Roaring Brook, which launched in 2002 and publishes about 20 titles a season, succeed where the giant and venerable Random House could not? In the last 10 years, Random has published 11 Wilson titles stateside, with combined sales of 600,000. In England, where Wilson began writing for children 25 years ago, her sales are approaching 25 million. Her bestselling title, The Story of Tracy Beaker, is a franchise in itself, having spawned sequels, a hit television series and a popular line of merchandise.
In a 2003 BBC poll, four of Wilson's titles made a list of Britain's 100 best-loved books (only Charles Dickens and Terry Pratchett had more, at five each). A Wilson book-signing can punish the feet: fans have been known to spend eight hours in line for an autograph.
It was at one of those autographing sessions that Wilson found inspiration for Candyfloss. She spied a large man standing in the long line of girls waiting to have a book signed. “He had a chip van, and he said when [his daughter] stayed with him, which let me know he didn't have her fulltime, she would read my books in the back of the van while he was working,” Wilson says. “That seemed so tender to me, and it gave me an idea for the relationship between Floss and her dad.”
Like many of Wilson's middle-grade books, Candyfloss doesn't flinch at life's grittier elements. The heroine's father is kind-hearted but a business failure; homelessness is on the horizon. Some punks at a fairground pull a knife on him and in the ensuing scuffle, his van is set afire. Characters gamble and drink. Family members are estranged—one character hasn't seen his son since the latter left for Australia, where he “runs a bar for boys only.”
That honest reflection of contemporary realities, combined with the author's unwillingness to tie things up neatly, works fine in Wilson's YA titles, says Beverly Horowitz, who was her publisher at Bantam Doubleday Dell. But the same mixture made middle-grade books a tougher sell, she believes, because their content straddled traditional American publishing categories.
“Ten years ago the gatekeepers of the children's book world were a little more cautious about the content of Jacky Wilson's books than perhaps they would be now,” Horowitz says. “Jacky deals with things like eating disorders, problems that she doesn't necessarily feel she can solve, but she does bring up. In a YA novel, that's fine. But in middle-grade books, where very often it's adults who are paying for the book, that lack of resolution is problematic for some.”
Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville, Ill., zeroes in on a different problem: the covers. In England, Wilson and her longtime collaborator, Nick Sharratt, are as well-known a team as Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. But Sharratt's illustrations don't work in the U.S. market, says Anderson. “Kids here are very sophisticated and cover art is extremely important,” she says. “The artwork was just too babyish and, even more than that, I don't think it reflected what the stories were about.”
Boughton is confident that Roaring Brook can translate Wilson's extraordinary popularity in the U.K. into American success. Disciplined and energetic at 62, Wilson has just completed a high-profile, two-year stint as Britain's Children's Laureate, her following more solid than ever, and she has maintained her two-books-a-year pace. “Our goal is to very quickly catch up to her British publishing schedule,” says Boughton. “She's got that kind of rock-star potential.”
