A self-published children's book, which took France by storm, has arrived in Britain. Will it have the same impact here?
On 14 October, 2009, a long email arrived at BibliObs, the very grown-up literary supplement of the French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur.
It came from a 14-year-old girl Achille, who said she was "furious with the ugly world of books. Rubbish books do well because big publishers spend fortunes." She wrote to tell them about a new series, which was "self-published but it's a bestseller because thousands in France know it by word-of-mouth and through the forum. Help Pollockmaniacs show publishers it's teens who make a book a success, not them with all their advertising."
Hundreds of other "Pollockmaniacs" instantly piled in, most making much the same point: they were fed up with having "intellectual publishers" foist "the next Harry Potter" on them when they had already found it: Oksa Pollock, a series by two Strasbourg librarians, Anne Plichota and Cendrine Wolf.
The two friends first discussed their six-volume story – about a young girl who moves to London with her family and discovers she has supernatural powers – at a New Year's Eve party. Featuring a titanic struggle between good and evil, imaginary creatures, magic, realism and a child's unending quest, they had high hopes for the first two volumes, finished in late 2006.
But Gallimard, the French publishers of Harry Potter, weren't interested. Oksa, another publisher said, was "just not literary enough". Undeterred, Plichota and Wolf tested their books on a panel of teens, launched a website and an online community, and got printing. They delivered their books to bookshops by hand, and gave away free copies at school gates.
The first three volumes sold 5,000 copies apiece, an astonishing feat for a self-published children's book with no commercial backing. But it was Achille and her friends' increasingly indignant letter-writing that finally prompted a Paris publishing house to take notice, in 2010.
The rest, as you probably guessed, is history: Oksa Pollock's combined adventures have now sold more than half a million copies in 27 countries.
Pollockmania arrives in Britain on 4 June, when the first English-language edition of volume one, The Last Hope, hits the bookshops. Will it work its magic here? Oksa Pollock does seem to differ from many Paris publishers' idea of what constitutes a good children's book.
"That imperishable stuff … over-intellectual stuff … most people won't read it," say its authors. Their aim, they say, is to please their readers. It could do well.