The art of the throwaway children's series

Hey

I hope 2021 has been alright for you so far. I know it hasn’t been long since I last wrote a blog, but I suddenly thought of a really interesting idea to write about and wanted to get right into it.

I was in a big Waterstones just before Christmas and overheard a little girl reading out book titles of this magic unicorn-looking series to her dad, probably about which ones she owned and which ones to buy for Christmas. They sounded so similar to Rainbow Magic titles at that moment I realised oh wait, other girly book series exist too.

In the 2020 blog, I began to think more about the depths of Rainbow Magic and that the problem was never the artwork or the writing, but the way it’s produced. I’ve always wanted to look into the psychology of making a throwaway book series and I’m finally in the mood to do it. It’s been a thought in my subconscious that I never looked deeper into -

"How are these series so successful and why do I think they’re so scummy?"

Other things I’ll talk about: background of book series, production-management-writing rainbow magic, rainbow magic’s present problems, similar series, art vs money, what this says about society, the meaning of life

N.B: This is gonna be a long read, but I already feel your pain and have tried to make it as visual as possible.

Disclaimer

I‘m absolutely NOT qualified in literature, business, sociology, psychology or ANYTHING. I have A Levels but nothing relevant to the publishing world.

I‘m not an avid reader - I’ve read a variety of books, and the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series, but I wouldn’t call myself a bookworm. However I‘ve been following Rainbow Magic for around 15 years and its sister series as they came and went.

In this blog, I’m making observations, assumptions, and being realistic. I will try and keep my opinions out of this but if I don’t, I’ll tell you when.

Book series before Rainbow Magic

• Adrian Mole

This is the earliest most famous book series for kids off the top of my head. I’ve never touched it, but I was just aware of it and thought it was a rip-off Diary of a Wimpy Kid (me not knowing it existed decades before). From what I gather, it’s about Adrian age 13 and 3/4, has a bunch of recurring characters who live in the world at time of writing. It references current affairs, influenced by politics and seems to be a kind of satirical humorous diary-style book for young adults, so its target age is older than Rainbow Magic.

As the books go on the characters age, with the final one ending at Adrian being almost 40. Not an assembly-line book series, it doesn’t seem to be a collectible book series either, just a normal series of books that were published when they were ready to be published.

The fact the main character lives in the same world as us creates a lot of interesting concepts to write about as they change age. This is something Rainbow Magic can’t do, as the girls are stuck in their 8-11 year old selves in the sleepy town of Tippington and they aren’t going anywhere.

• Baby-Sitters Club

In no way am I qualified to talk about the Baby-Sitters Club as if I know all about it. From scanning over the wiki, it appears to have actual storylines and continuity that affects the next books. Characters come and go, they stay the same age but have personalities and different relationships with each other. There are over 100 books in this series, from 1986-2000. They eventually finished the book series when the main characters graduate middle school. They appear to have more similarities to Rainbow Magic, with ghostwriters, their collectibility and girl audience.

• Animal Ark and Heartland

Animal Ark books

These were extremely successful too as I remember my sister reading them but I never knew they were created by Working Partners as well. There’s a Heartland TV show now as well, and the publishers revived Animal Ark in 2018. In this article Lucy Courtenay who wrote for Animal Ark and Beast Quest says "Animal Ark is said to have started the whole series fiction phenomenon in the 1990s" and it’s true. After this, Rainbow Magic and all its reincarnations appeared.

Behind the scenes

As previously mentioned, Working Partners did animal book series like Animal Ark and Heartland. However I think their biggest hit has to be Rainbow Magic. As years went on, more and more company names got thrown into the conversation about Rainbow Magic - HIT Entertainment, Hachette (I’ve been reading it as ha-shetee for the past 5 years and I don’t want to correct myself ever), Orchard and The Watts Publishing Group. For the rest of the blog I’m gonna use the umbrella term ‘publishers’ to describe all these companies since I don’t know who’s in charge of what.

I’ve been doing a bit of digging into Rainbow Magic’s history with these companies and it’s made me even more confused. I don’t know anything for certain but this is what I found that I can make sense of. I made a diagram but I think it’s just as useful to try and explain a timeline too. 

• pre 2003: Watts Publishing Group has owned Orchard Books for at least 16 years. [source]
• 2003: Working Partners creates Rainbow Magic and gives it to Orchard Books. I’m guessing they still had some kind of control over it.
• 2007: Rainbow Magic Ltd is formed (previous name was Working Partners Ltd from 1995-2007) so I’m guessing Working Partners split ways? [source]
  • 2007: May be correlated, first mention of Hachette in the copyright of the Petal Fairies.
  • ~2008: Also may be correlated, enter HIT Entertainment (aka Mattel). HIT Entertainment owns Rainbow Magic Ltd (the person listed as director is Mattel employee) [source]
• 2012: Working Partners merges with Coolabi, taking Beast Quest Ltd along with them. As Rainbow Magic doesn’t have a big feature on their website, I don’t think they own it anymore. [source]
• 2014: Various book companies merge into Hachette Children’s Group, with Watts Publishing Group as one of their imprints [source]
• 2015: Watts Publishing HQ changes address to Hachette’s [source]. The first time The Watts Publishing Group and Hachette are seen in the same sentence in the copyright is the Fairytale Fairies.
• Weirdly, I don’t know what relation Rainbow Magic Ltd. has with Rainbow Magic. Does it oversee everything related to Rainbow Magic?

So you can see this is a giant assembly line that even I’m confused writing about. I’ve been naive cos I didn’t expect books to have this much maintenance. I thought everyone was just working under one happy company but it’s actually a giant spider’s web.

Creative freedom

From reading the "how we work" section on Working Partners’ old website, I found that the writers are given way little slack than I thought. I already knew that the writers are given the storyline then they write it into actual literature, but I was surprised to see the storylines (they call them ‘skeleton outlines’) they’re given are literally as detailed as the story summaries Veralidaine and I have been writing on the fairies’ pages (see here for an example of similar detail to the example they give on their website).

I expected it to be like

Rachel and Kirsty find a goblin pretending to be a rapper and trick him into taking the magic clef necklace off. They convince him to wear fashionable clothes and he takes off the necklace.

But it’s actually as detailed as

They hear an amazing rapper in the karaoke tent, who turns out to be a goblin. They decide to trick him by pretending he will be the opening act. Kirsty, disguised as a music agent, takes him to Rachel, disguised as a festival official, who says he doesn’t look the part. The girls get him to wear the fashionable clothes Jessie has magicked up and convince him to take off the clef necklace in exchange for a flashier one as it ruins his image.

They don’t appear to give many chances for the author to be creative. So the authors are really good at fleshing out the story and making it sound exciting, deciding which synonym for ‘said’ is better, smoothly transitioning from each plot point, adding some juicy description, but what’s the point in hiring experienced writers with BA degrees when they can’t even come up with the ideas and storylines.

That’s the problem with these series: it’s not written by experienced authors like Rachel Elliot or Narinder Dhami or Sue Mongredien, it’s written by the publishers but in the words of experienced authors. The authors just do the narrating; there can be giant differences in quality of a storyline and quality of how it’s written. I don’t know if they’re allowed to contribute their ideas to the storyline (realistically they probably are if they feel something doesn’t work) but from what their website implies, the publishers have main control over the plot and the publishers are the ones with the mind for making money.

I hate this section because it got too deep

In the article I previously linked, Lucy Courtenay says "[commercial fiction packers] simply need writers who can write and who are able and happy to follow a detailed brief." As a student-age person, I feel this affects the meaning of life for us. don’t laugh (well you can cos it was a sudden change in tone) because I’ve struggled with this mentality for a while now.

What’s the point in slaving away getting writing degrees when employers just need someone to write what they need? Someone who did all that could get passed over for all the talented fanfiction writers who are simply good at writing because they read or practise a lot. It’s all good for other sectors like accounting and medicine cos it’s hard to learn that stuff on your own and employers look for qualifications, but it’s easy to teach yourself how to be good at art.

I don’t want to be the boomer going "pah I miss the old days where the only way you could get jobs was to see an ad, send in your CV and attend the interview. Unqualified swines taking all our jobs". It’s progressive that anyone creative around the world can get the same opportunities if they didn’t study further. But it just made me wonder what the point in getting a degree is if someone can succeed without it.

The formula of Orchard series

I won’t include Animal Ark as it was created before Rainbow Magic. I’ve made a table here to demonstrate how blatant this formula is.

Series	Small group of human friends	Aspects of magic	Fantasy land	Benevolent mentors to main characters	Antagonist and sidekicks	Authors under pen-name	Make-up of books in series	How long did it last?
Rainbow Magic	Rachel and Kirsty	Magic fairies	Fairyland	King Oberon and Queen Titania	Jack Frost and Goblins	Daisy Meadows	4 or 7 in a set, bumper specials	still going
Beast Quest	Tom and Elenna	Magic beasts and wizards	Avantia	King Hugo and Queen Aroha	Malvel and others	Adam Blade	4 or 6 in a set, bumper specials	still going
Secret Kingdom	Summer, Jasmine and Ellie	Pixies in magic land	The Secret Kingdom	Trixi and King Merry	Queen Malice and Sprites	Rosie Banks	4 or 6 in a set, bumper specials	3 years
Sea Quest	Max and Lia	Magic sea beasts and wizards	Nemos	None	The Professor and others	Adam Blade	4 in a set, bumper specials	3 years
Magic Animal Friends	Jess and Lily	Talking magic animals	Friendship Forest	None	Grizelda and Boggits	Daisy Meadows	4 in a set, bumper specials	4 years
Secret Princesses	Mia and Charlotte	Princesses who can grant wishes	Wishing Star Palace	Princess Alice	Princess Poison	Rosie Banks	4 in a set, bumper specials	2 years
Team Hero	Jack, Ruby and Danny	Magic superhero-type things	Hero Academy	Professor Rufus	General Gore and his army	Adam Blade	4 in a set, bumper specials	2 years
Unicorn Magic	Emily and Aisha	Magic unicorns	Enchanted Valley	Queen Aurora	Selena	Daisy Meadows	4 in a set, bumper specials	3 years
Sea Keepers	Emily, Layla and Grace	Magic mermaids	Atlantis	Princess Marina	Effluvia and Sirens	Coral Ripley	stand-alone, bumper specials	3 years
Pixie Magic	Alice and Leo	Magic pixies	Don't know yet	Don't know yet	Grimble and Grumble	Daisy Meadows	stand-alone, bumper specials	still going

Something I find interesting is how long each series (apart from the flagship ones, Rainbow Magic and Beast Quest) last, exactly 2-4 years. I would be interested to know what the reason for ending each series is - loss of reader interest, low sales, no more ideas, changing trends, "it's just time to end it". Who knows?

Collectibles

Everyone likes collecting things. I’m a completionist, or at least try to be - I make sure I’ve scoured every world in a Mario game before moving on, I complete every skill on Duolingo for every new skill I start (I know that’s not an effective method in learning). It always hurt me to see my friends’ bookshelves of just 2 or 3 Sporty Fairies, half the Weather Fairies and the one fairy with their name on it. That’s the completionist in me, it’s satisfying to see the whole collection. And it would hurt to see a collection incomplete. I’ve heard of kids making lists of all the fairies they don’t have, and also the girl in Waterstones showing her dad which unicorny books she didn’t have. We just love collectibles.

Some people just want to complete things, and I think that is what makes a book series so successful.

Blank-slate characters

Rachel and Kirsty started off on the wrong foot so as a consequence were never given personalities at all. How can someone describe their personalities? Well, they’re both determined to help fairies. They’re kind and caring, gotta include those words. They’re friendly and optimistic. Uh... Kirsty comes up with the plans most of the time... Rachel gets caught by goblins most of the time.....
There’s really nothing much you can say about them. 18 years and we still don’t know the actual colour of Kirsty’s eyes or hair. I doubt this is done for effect as Rachel’s has been mentioned before.

They started improving this in their next series, Secret Kingdom. The main characters had different interests (art, animals and performing), which came with personality traits (respectively jokey but afraid of heights, shy and girly, loud and confident). At some points in the series they’d use their talents to their advantage and I really appreciate that. In Magic Animal Friends, both characters just really love animals. Then in their next series Unicorn Magic, they made their characters like science and sport. I haven’t read the books so I don’t know how they use this in their plots. Nice fempowerment though.

In their newest series Sea Keepers, what hobbies do their characters have? Dyslexia. Wait, that’s not a hobby. From looking through samples, what I gather is that character’s personality trait is dyslexia - whenever this character has to read something, the other characters help her tackle it. That’s nice, but is that all that’s unique about her? It’s inclusive (all the power to them) but if that’s the only thing that sets a character apart, it’s a bit lame innit. If you were a character in a book or tv show and you had some kind of disorder like dyspraxia, I doubt it you’d want to be known as ‘the dyspraxic character’. You’d want your other traits like ‘determined, resourceful, reserved’ to define you.

I’m gonna reveal something really personal to me and show a part of some profiles for some of my OCs just to show you how easy it is to literally give someone fictional a personality and useless facts that might say something about their character. To be honest, I haven’t interacted with kids in ages so I don’t know if they’re all happy-go-lucky and cheery like they are in these books. Of course they won’t be salty and resigned like my adult OCs, they haven’t been exposed to the soul-crushing secondary school experience.

Back to Orchard’s characters, they could at least make someone have a negative trait like being shy or skeptical or unconfident so they can overcome it and have a character arc. Maybe two of the friends don’t get along well? If I, and all these people on DeviantArt making OCs, can create dynamic human characters, I don’t see how hard it could be for a series with 50+ books to insert character development in it too.

Like the title of this section says, you could argue that Rachel and Kirsty are plain because the publishers want the readers to imagine themselves in their places, but they show they’re willing to give their characters interests in the next series. You could argue that they did that to give kids who have the same interests someone to relate to. But even then everyone’s just too creepily perfect.

2023 update

After the introduction of Gracie Adebayo and Khadijah Khan, from the samples alone, I gather they're more interesting characters than Rachel and Kirsty are. Gracie was born without her left hand, she has 2 mums, Khadijah lives with her parents and grandmother, she has a brother (who is diabetic). The relative interestingness of them compared to Rachel and Kirsty's nuclear only-child families should rejuvenate the series, the reason I guessed these 2 new characters were introduced. I haven't read Hope the Welcome Fairy so I can't say any details about it, but I can guess that it's like a soft reboot of Rainbow Magic and I hope that Gracie and Khadijah are more interesting and their characters get developed throughout the series.

Not ready to be published

I always thought it was strange how before the first Unicorn Magic book was released, they’d already announced the next series and a bumper special (bit smug to assume people will like the first series but shouldn’t put someone down for being optimistic).

I mentioned this in the beginning of the blog but I don’t blame you if it’s been so long ago that you can’t remember. The difference between a normal book series and an Orchard’s book series seems to be that Orchard’s book series announce books when they aren’t ready to be published. They announce their release dates over a year in advance, they release ‘coming soon’ covers, and eventually the final cover. Then they might change the fairy’s name or swap the publish dates. This book is obviously not ready to be published, so why announce it if it’s not even ready yet? This just leads to a deadline, and it’s hard to work under a deadline. I don’t know if there’s an insider business reason to this but it just doesn’t make sense.

I get they might be doing this to build up excitement of bookshop queues akin to the release of Deathly Hallows, but an Orchard book doesn’t seem to be ready. Deathly Hallows was finished in January 2007, its release for July was announced February 2007. The Harry Potter wiki first added a cover on the Deathly Hallows page in March 2007, so this all happened pretty close together. Meanwhile, the Rainbow Magic publishers can’t decide on the name or disability of a fairy by the time she’s published.

What’s going on?? All this shouldn’t be happening publicly

I have no publishing experience to say this looks unprofessional, but from a normal person’s view, it does.

General opinion

It’s hard to know what most people think about Rainbow Magic because hardly anyone who reads them says (only their parents). I’ve seen a few types of opinions around the internet and in person, I’ll try and put them into words.

• Trashy - A major news site the Telegraph wrote an article (no point looking it up, you have to pay to read it now) about how hated Rainbow Magic is by parents. It says how parents whose kids make them read these books to them sigh every time they have to open one and they can see through the general formula of a fairy book plot line, yet their kids still love them and make them buy more. Parents whose kids can read fairy books on their own probably don’t dislike the series as much since they’re not exposed to the content in it, but I can understand how just the abundance of fairies that their children could threaten them to buy might make them feel sick.
• Great presents - I see this on Amazon reviews a lot and I get it - it’s nice receiving a book with your name on it (or something as close as possible) and being thankful to the giver who actively thought about you as they bought it. That’s fair enough, they’re nice little presents.
• Nostalgia - The kids who read the books in the early 00s when ideas were still fresh remember this series with fondness. I wrote about this in this blog. These opinions tend to be seen through rose tinted glasses - they’re not interested in what Rainbow Magic became, but what it used to be and how they remember it.
• At the right reading level/encouraged my kids to read - From all the reviews on Amazon and the popularity in schools, it seems like they are doing alright in education terms.

Tous les mêmes

All the girly book series are the same.

A while ago CoolStar messaged me and pointed something out. She’d obviously been keeping up with Unicorn Magic books unlike me, and she found that one book description is about a unicorn in charge of nightmares and dreams, which has already been done in Rainbow Magic. I looked into this more and there are also weddings, birthday parties, stars, rivers. If you’re redirecting your Daisy Meadows audience to check out her other series, how can you think to reuse the same plot points as the series they’ve just come from? The only difference being this time, unicorns or fairies are thrown into the context. They’ve also been using the same poor illustrator for 4 series (Rainbow Magic, Secret Princesses, Unicorn Magic, Sea Keepers) albeit in a different style but you can still tell it’s the same artist, which makes the book series feel even more similar.

No doubt some other companies will pick up on the collectable series style. I found that the series I heard the girl in Waterstones talking about is ‘Unicorn Academy’ from Nosy Crow and while researching, was humoured to finally understand why I felt confused as to why she was reading out Rainbow Magicky titles on unicorny books. These are some titles: ‘Zara and Moonbeam’, ‘Ava and Star’, ‘Freya and Honey’. I’m not saying they’re a rip-off of Rainbow and Unicorn Magic, but how other girls’ book series have many similarities.

Another girls’ series is Lucky Stars, also created by Working Partners but published by Pan Macmillan. Again, same subject matters of birthdays, ponies, ballerinas, sleepovers all tied together by the theme of wishes, which we’ve heard before. In these stories, the two friends are a girl and a boy so at least that’s different. I can’t judge the contents of the above series.

Boys’ and girls’ series

Beast Quest books

If you couldn’t sense the blog taking a more cautious turn above, it has now. Let’s turn to Rainbow Magic’s boy counterpart, Beast Quest.

The illustrations are so much more detailed, like a proper fantasy story illustration. The shading and detail on them are much akin to a graphic novel, then Rainbow Magic’s are just nice soft little line art drawings. I absolutely understand that, some kids just find simpler drawings nicer to look at. In my personal preference, the Beast Quest books look a little too ePiC for what I’d want to read as an 8 year old and I don’t really care about dragons or beasts. If there are girls who like that stuff and boys who like flimsy fairy covers, there’s nothing wrong with that. These series appear to shamelessly tailor themselves to the extremes of each gender. There is no inbetween at Orchard (but Beast Quest author’s parallel series Team Hero relatively looks more unisex).

Since I have no knowledge of the series I asked the admin of the Beast Quest wiki (Ferroequine) about what’s been happening. Seems to me that the stories are a bit more EpIc than Rainbow Magic, characters are allowed to die (but the writers aren’t brave enough to let them stay dead) with relatively complicated plots and twists. It has the same personality problem as Rainbow Magic, but the main character’s father is missing, which seems like some interesting character development could happen. Each Beast Quest book has a separate villain which seems more interesting than a goblin popping up - once again.

Maybe it’s the subject matters that appeal to girls that make it harder to come up with more tangled and complicated plots. Think of ways to make a plot twist about girls who have been helping fairies in charge of the pettiest things in the world (birthday cake, fashion magazines, boy bands) get their magic mcguffins back, who always succeed, who have no siblings to make them cautious around, whose parents practically leave them to their own devices, for almost 20 years. It’s hard (though one that I can think of is the Tates adopted Kirsty and the Walkers adopted Rachel since they have opposite hair colours to their parents..).

While finding other alike series to roast, I found the perfect picture from a blog about what to read after Rainbow Magic on childhood101.com. It was like finding a family photo of cousins.

Apart from the aesthetics, what stood out most to me was the titles of the series, which include recognisable words: Club, Princess, Secret, Fairy, Magic, Unicorn, Animal, Mermaid, Friends
No way am I going to lead myself into a sociological rant about where stereotypes and sexism stem from, but if we’re trying to eradicate it why do we keep making books like these for kids to read?

On the other side, I found a similar blog about what to read after Beast Quest on booktrust.org.uk, and made my own compilation picture of what they suggested. Maybe some have the ePiC Beast Quest look about them, but they aren’t as blatantly boyish as the girls’ ones look girly, like, I can imagine a 10 year old girl and boy sitting next to each other shamelessly reading the same book.

Male and female characters

Rainbow Magic is about girls - there are hardly any male characters except Mr Tate and Walker, King Oberon and the villains, Jack Frost and the goblins. I doubt it this was done for malicious intent towards boys. Generally as kids, girls and boys naturally feel rivalled since they just don’t like each other (I’m not a psychologist so I can’t say why but that’s how I remember it) and that’s reflected in the book series. The only female villain is Jack Frost’s sister Jilly Chilly. I really like this cos she’s used for comic effect and parts of the plot. If you swapped her for a brother, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Beast Quest however started off with boy and girl main characters. Ferroequine reports that there’s always been some villains being misogynistic - they’re villains, that’s one way of ensuring your audience will hate them even more. Whenever these characters say degrading things, the girl characters always do something to prove them wrong. The only degrading things Jack Frost and the goblins say are like "pesky fairies" or "stupid girls" (in reference to Rachel and Kirsty) but degradation in Beast Quest appears to be more general. Ferroequine also says that around 2012, the girl power thing became more noticeable. Before, female characters were only being used to be rescued but then they were taking the spotlight. To me, this seems like the makers of Beast Quest felt a need to tell boys that girls have power too, but the makers of Rainbow Magic didn’t feel a need to do it so blatantly.

In Orchard’s later series, they’ve softened allusions of sexism by making villains the same gender as the main characters.

I also pointed out the weediness of the first boy fairy in my review of his book and how unspecial he was for being the first boy fairy. I wrote: "What significant things did the first boy fairy do in the book? Lose his wand for the whole story, tell the girls how Fairyland is segregated by gender, run his fingers through his hair and give the girls a lop-sided smile. Twice." I feel he was just created to fulfil a quota or be a selling point rather than adding to the universe but interpret that your own way.

Progressiveness

Observing Rainbow Magic over the last 3 years I sensed quite a lot of change happening. There came the first three disabled fairies, fairies with names from non-European cultures (Fatima, Priya, Aisha, Padma, Maryam), a fairy with a hijab, and a series made up of majority non-white fairies. The subject matters of 2020’s books were mainly educational or political.

For the record, the fairies have always been diverse but when all these things came one after the other, it became noticeable. I’m not saying this is bad, just pointing out that the publishers decided to sit down and to change their ways at a certain point. If they can actively diversify series in terms of demographics, what’s stopping them from making more diverse series for girls?

Book series for older kids

In my opinion, these are equivalent throwaway series for older kids, but there’s something different about them than the throwaway series for younger kids.

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

I remember being in Waterstones and my mum taking me to the shelf of fairy books. I spotted Diary of a Wimpy Kid on another shelf and picked it up. She said she’d only buy it for me if I could read the first sentence so off I went “first of all this is a journal not a diary etc” and she agreed and let me have it. Then the next visit to Waterstones, we got Rodrick Rules. Then the next, The Last Straw. I got the original do-it-yourself book 4 years before it became cool, and when the new revised edition came out, this boy in my class would do his best work in it like a flipping Calarts sketchbook. It just goes to show how collectible book series are omnipresent.

I’ve never interacted with Diary of a Wimpy Kid fans, it’s something I just kept to myself so I don’t know the general consensus on it and if it’s changed much. It seems like Greg’s still doing the same old things, sitting inside playing video games, hating his parents’ life choices, bullying Rowley. I can’t judge if the series has changed since I last read it but it looks like it’s going strong.

• Dork Diaries

Dork Diaries

There was something weird about this series, maybe because I started reading it when I was way too old. I can’t even remember when or why I read them, but if my mum willingly bought them for me without giving me a lecture on reading HG Wells etc, I was probably young enough.

Dork Diaries has become a meme for its self-centred main character Nikki, being the girly rival of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (which itself is not known as a ‘boy’s’ series), and the infamous EpIc fortnite dances and dabbing illustration. It’s full of girly ‘squeeees’ and ‘omgz’ about cringy moments in school and around her ‘crush’. 8 years later and Brandon is STILL her ‘crush’ even though they’ve kissed and they know they’re each others’ crushes. I remember arguing with my friend that it IS a proper book, I turn to a page and it’s just full of an elongated ‘AAAARGH’. Not exactly quality literature but I must’ve been enjoying it.

Uh Lexs why are you talking about this? You just want to talk about yourself again don’t you

Continuation of story lines - Dork Diaries is linear as each book has consequences in the next, and they might even influence the main plot. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is kind of linear and makes references to events in previous books. In Rainbow Magic, nothing has consequences. No one learns anything and nothing progresses, which is why you can just pick up any fairy, read it and yeet it back into the charity shop where you got it from. They go through seasons (spring break, summer holiday, October half term, Christmas holiday), but once the new year begins, it’s just a loop. Sure they might reference a fairy you haven’t heard of (the US version of Robyn the Christmas Party Fairy features Chrissie the Wish Fairy who wasn’t released in the US, so maybe the publishers don’t think it’s a big problem either), you might be itching to know how they get the other objects and how the series ends but it’s not essential to your enjoyment of it (unless you’re a completionist).

Wrapping up

The best part of these kinds of series (for the publishers) is that they have no end! All these series are timeless, they can keep throwing different fairies who need help at Rachel and Kirsty, they can keep placing Nikki in more and more unrealistic situations, they can keep coming up with ways of making Greg’s middle school life full of misfortune and social awkwardness. The publishers have established the series that they can continue (Rainbow Magic, Beast Quest) and throw mild ideas at them knowing the years of trust they’ve built up with parents, educators and their audience will keep them going. It’s shown they have the ability to end the other series they start, but not Rainbow Magic.

What will happen at the end of Rainbow Magic? I know lots of people have been thinking something like "Rachel and Kirsty will become fairies and they’ll get their wands". It would be too dark to just let them grow up, out of the 18 year-long coma of being 8-11 years old, and forget about the fairies. The only way I can see Rainbow Magic ending is they manage to make Jack Frost get along with the fairies, which they’ve shown he can. Maybe they won’t end Rainbow Magic because they can’t see a way to.

The main reason of the scumminess of throwaway children’s series

BRANDS.

Of course everything is about money. It’s laughable to suggest majority of pop stars today are releasing albums for their musical creativity and exploration when we know they just really like getting money. The fulfilment of proving musical prowess to themselves is just a bonus but first priority is money, and that’s understandable - it’s their job.

The publishers could say "we love making Rainbow Magic books, knowing our hard work has influenced children’s reading for almost 20 years, expanding their viewpoint of the world, empowering kids of all cultures and races, giving them inspiration to help the community like Rachel and Kirsty love doing". Maybe it was like that in the beginning, but now it’s become a brand; not big enough to spawn lunchboxes or stationary (though I do have some RM stationary in the old branding) but in the world of literature, ‘Daisy Meadows’ is a brand. Slap her name onto a book series, it’ll sell like Rainbow Magic which is why the main selling point for Magic Animal Friends and Unicorn Magic as they put on all the front covers is ‘from the author of RAINBOW MAGIC’.

Logo vs title

I noticed the sparkly logos on all the Orchard books (and most of the books on the other girls’ series) outshine the actual title of the books. I couldn’t even find the title of this Magic Animal Friend book: first I saw the logo, then the author, then the title in the sad little top right corner.

Percentage of area taken up by logo

The early Rainbow Magic books before the new logo had a more humbler logo size - the title was clearer and the author’s name was tiny. I was psycho enough to do a bit of maths (need to put at least one a level to use in this blog right) and sure enough the area that the logo took up increased very slowly, until it suddenly exploded on Deena’s cover.

(I don’t trust this - how did you calculate it?)

On my laptop I selected a box around each logo (not including the fairy on top) and took note of its dimensions. I calculated the area of the logo box, the area of the cover and found a percentage of how much the area of the logo box was of the cover.

The title is the most important thing about a book’s cover, but in these cases the series logo and author has become most important.

Should Rainbow Magic try to become less trash?

All my opinion in this section - no. Its reputation has been like this since people began feeling that there were too many fairies, and it’s too late to change it. Ex-readers and parents know it for what it is. If they suddenly erase all the faults I pointed out, they might risk losing their current audience (and I’ll just think it’s a bit strange they found this blog and decided to listen to me, their most toxic follower). I shouldn’t say the factory-churned quality is what makes Rainbow Magic what it is, but I will, and it works for some people.

Because they’re continuing to make these, it’s clear the current readers of Rainbow Magic aren’t bothered by the faceless characters, the reliable formula, or the journey a fairy takes from being called Hazel to Annie, because they’re young and they don’t notice. The current readers are all that matter, not us ex-readers who grew up to realise how trash the series and means of production actually is. As long as there are other quality books out there for children to read.

How can the world move on from this

I have no idea, it is what it is. Sorry if that was anticlimactic.

This whole blog I’ve been flipping between "it’s morally wrong to be making rubbish books for money and so shamelessly too" and "it’s people’s livelihoods, just let them do it" and to be honest, I’m still not sure which side I stand on.

I think it’s the creativeness in me that prioritises quality/care put into art and literature, but the passiveness and cynicism that just accepts this is how things are done nowadays. I’m getting too tangled up so I need to wrap things up.

In the end, the only opinion that matters is yours and where you stand on the morals of art vs. money spectrum.

TLDR

(bold are points I think are most important)

How are these series so successful?

• collectibles - people like seeing their collections complete
• same subject matters - if someone likes unicorns, they’re sure to like another unicorn series
• lots to choose from - the amount of books in each series, as well as all the series similar to each other
• easy to churn out - splitting the workload into multiple companies makes it easier
• formulaic - idk the psychology behind children's love for it, but it exists.

Why do I think they’re so scummy?

• the lack of personality in characters
• same subject matters - always ponies, unicorns, princesses and magic
• formulaic - they don’t need to try anymore as they know what works
• the amount of companies involved - if this is how books are normally produced nowadays, fair enough, but it just reinforces the stigma of assembly-line books.
• written by publishers not authors - storylines written by publishers who are more likely to only do it for the money, rather than written by authors who are more likely to do it for the sake of art
• they‘re announced way before they’re ready - this just gives the publishers a deadline when they haven’t decided on some things about the book. It looks unorganised and sloppy.
• blatant brands - giving more attention to the brand of a book rather than the individual titles.
• quality of art matters to me

Final words

Children’s book series are good and all, giving children a sense of comfort in a universe they can revisit after a hard day, but some companies are shamelessly exploiting this form of literature as they know the love their young readers have for these types of series will keep them loyal through whatever they decide to capitalise on next. (that was an aggressive paragraph but I wanted to keep it in)

It’s nothing new to call out companies on doing things for the money. I’m glad I could finally get stuff together and do it for real this time, rather than just angrily hinting at it through my other blogs. If any assumptions I’ve made offend or confuse you, please comment and I’ll try and explain myself. I don’t "get off" on roasting Rainbow Magic, it’s just rewarding when things finally make sense.

Thanks for reading, I hope this blog uncovered some things for you. Well, maybe not ‘uncovered’ but put things you’ve always been thinking about these kinds of books into words.

Have a good one

LexsJB_Talk 4 January, 2021 (updated 5 April 2023)