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For much of her career, Stacy Gregg has written about fashion. But she is about to show another side to her professional life that may surprise a few of this country's more ardent fashion followers.
Gregg has become a children's fiction author. Her Pony Club Secrets series, aimed at 8-to-12-year-olds, launches here on Friday.
The series is being published by Harper Collins UK, which has made it one of their lead children's series for the year.
It is already doing well in the UK, where the first two books have already made it on to one major chain's children's best seller list. Gregg has also sold the German rights to the eight books and interest has been expressed in the film rights.
All of which - plus the books' combination of pre-pubescents, magic and horses - have led to locals asking the question, could Gregg be the next J. K. Rowling, the British author whose Harry Potter books have made her a household name?
Gregg doesn't think so. "For one thing, she [Rowling] is an anomaly - her sales figures obliterate every other children's book out there, put together," Gregg says. "So there's absolutely no chance of me being her. If I can just be a successful children's pony book author, long term, I'd be happy."
Pony books might seem an unlikely choice for a writer who's honed her skills in the sometimes bitchy, always novelty-fixated world of fashion, but it turns out riding and horses have been a passion of Gregg's since she was a child growing up in the Waikato. "I was obsessed from an early age."
She got her first pony as a nine-year-old, when her family moved from Auckland to the countryside. Gregg and her sister joined the Ngaruawhahia Pony Club, which serves a template for the club in the books, and spent almost every weekend competing in or attending pony-club rallies.
Somewhere in storage there's a big bag full of the ribbons that Gregg, as a "decent but nowhere near the top level" rider won at these events.
At the age of 16 though, Gregg went to boarding school and it was at that stage she also gave up riding. But, she says, throughout her professional life as a fashion editor she's continued to quietly hanker after her own horse. It's only recently, as she started writing what she calls her "pony girls' books", that she's started riding again.
Gregg first wrote the books quite a while ago - when her daughter, now seven, was first born.
At that stage, Gregg found the only sort of work she could fit in, between caring for her baby, was writing fiction.
She didn't deliberately choose to write for "tweenagers" because the market looked lucrative after Harry Potter. But she did do some research. "There were a couple of modern [pony centric] series that I found truly awful," Gregg says.
"The writers seemed to know nothing about horses and they didn't have any genuine passion for them. And I found the only really good horse books for girls like me were written way back in the '50s. So I knew there was room in the genre."
Gregg completed the first book in three months. Her agent then shopped the manuscript around various international publishers.
Although there was a lot of initial interest (one publisher even asked her if she could please add a boy wizard to the books - she refused), Gregg didn't actually get a publishing contract for six years.
It was late 2005 before Harper Collins UK finally called again and, freshly enthusiastic about Pony Club Secrets, offered her an eight-book contract.
The first two books - Mystic and the Midnight Ride, Blaze and the Dark Rider - have been on sale in the UK since August. The titles are now being sold in the Commonwealth market and will be translated into German and go on sale there in 2008.
So far, Pony Club Secrets has had a good response from the target market.
English tweens seem to like them and Gregg believes the books translate well to the European landscape because, she says, "even though there are big differences in the way we treat our horses here, our pony club system is still quite British".
The first two releases in the series are sitting at numbers 12 and 15 on the children's top 30 books chart at WHSmith, a large English bookseller chain visited by more than 70 per cent of the population there each year - alongside the likes of Disney's High School Musical and Harry Potter.
But whether Gregg will become fabulously wealthy and famous, she isn't sure quite yet.
"I'm just happy they're out there."
Then again, here's something that all would-be children's book authors may like to note: J. K. Rowling made only a few thousand pounds in the two years after her first Harry Potter book was printed.
