Well, right now, Magic Tree House has sold over 50 million books in this country; and then we’re best sellers in a lot of other countries. We’re best sellers in Germany and France and Italy and Korea and Japan, to name a few. I believe we’re in 29 countries, but we’ve had the wonderful experience this past month of visiting Japan where the series is the second best seller after Harry Potter of series.
They had a national contest of bookstores to come up with displays for the series and of schools to submit. The prize would be a visit from me and the schools would submit why they loved the series. My husband and I went over and visited all these bookstores in Japan; our publishers there took us around; and then we went to the Japanese schools and had a wonderful time.
We really felt: oh, my God — kids are the same everywhere. You know, there was such a similarity in those readers and the readers here. We just went to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico — the kids were reading Magic Tree House there — and the Navajo children were just like the Japanese children, just like the American children.
We’re getting this great sense of kids being connected. Not that the series connects them, but the series is the evidence or the lens of you can look at the kids through to say: you know, kids are really
I don’t want to sound Pollyanna, but they’re wonderful everywhere. They identify with Jack and Annie who have super values and are responsible and good learners and want to help people.
These little kids in all these other countries feel the same and they want to learn about the world. It’s very heartening. We love now this idea of traveling internationally to meet readers; and we may go to Europe in the next year to visit some of the readers over there.
