Behind the pony club

She is one of our bestselling authors but has so far managed to keep a low profile at home. Rebecca Barry Hill charts Stacy Gregg’s meteoric rise from copywriter to international bestseller

From Central Flair magazine, a free bi-monthly APN Print publication.

There’s no mistaking which is Stacy Gregg’s Westmere house. A horse float, emblazoned with the title of her second book series, Pony Club Rivals, is parked outside. 

The former fashion journalist is now one of New Zealand’s best-selling authors, with young fans all over the world hooked on her riding adventure tales. Her first series, for 8-12 year-old girls, was Pony Club Secrets, about horse-mad Issie and her friends. In 2010 Gregg followed it up with Rivals, set mostly in the US and the UK. The spin-off series is slightly older and more glamorous, following an elite riding academy in Kentucky.

Gregg says the books have sold over a million copies, and the titles have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Danish and Dutch. Both series have been optioned for films and TV.

Gregg has always been a writer, starting out as an advertising copywriter and making her name as a fashion journalist, as Sunday magazine’s fashion editor and the creator of runwayreporter.com. She also compiled the book Undressed: New Zealand Fashion Designers Tell Their Stories.

Her foray into fiction came after having daughter Issie, (now 11), and finding it difficult to combine her work with the baby’s schedule. Fiction had never occurred to her as a career path but being at home with a new routine she got stuck in and wrote her first manuscript, which she sent to Harper Collins UK.

“Doing fiction was quite odd having written about other people for ages and having to rely on other people’s lives to fuel what you do.”

At the time, Harry Potter fever had taken over and publishers were hungry for magicians and mysticism. Despite showing interest in the idea, they told her there wasn’t a gap in the market for a pony club series.

Gregg was surprised. She’d grown up reading Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion series and the Jill books by Ruby Ferguson, and figured there was always a demand for books about ponies. But she had to concede there’d been few since the 1940s and 50s. Disappointed, she shelved the manuscript. It wasn’t until five years later her fortune turned around – Harper Collins wrote to tell her a pony club series was just what they needed, and they wanted Gregg to write it. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

“I burst into tears because by then I had Runway Reporter and I was still Sunday magazine’s fashion editor and it was two months before New Zealand Fashion Week. They were saying, when can she do the rewrites on the novel and when can we have the second one? I had a complete freak out.”

Gregg battled through Fashion Week, sold Runway Reporter, and as soon as a contract arrived, launched headlong into her new life as a fiction writer. If she’d known that the average author in the UK earns 5000 pounds a year, and that the chances of a four-book contract being continued were so slim, she might have been put off.

“It’s a bit like winning Lotto, becoming a novelist.”

Gregg had been a huge fan of the Joss Whedan series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so she used that as inspiration to plot out the 13-book series, (including a Christmas special). Whereas it’s common for Kiwi writers to forego the local backdrop in favour of the more marketable British and American settings, Gregg wanted to draw on her own experience of growing up with horses in New Zealand. (She still rides her horse, a Dutch Warmblood named Ash.) She set the first series in Gisborne, New Zealand, and later, as Issie progresses with her riding skills, in Spain and the US.

“It’s me living vicariously because I was never a good enough rider to enter area trials. For the British market, having the books set in New Zealand is more exotic, because they’ve all been to Majorca for their holidays but they haven’t been to Gisborne. They all want to come and ride here. Their vision of New Zealand is they think they’re going to get off the plane and the place is going to be full of horses.”

Despite the geographical distance, there are several similarities between the New Zealand and British pony club scenes, she says.

“A lot of pony fiction is driven by a girl being too poor to get a pony. Lots of girls don’t have enough money for a pony or their parents are not willing to buy them one. In New Zealand it’s not that unaffordable, well it wasn’t quite so much when I was a kid. It’s much more egalitarian. You’re not a ‘Hooray Henry’, you’re just going down the pony club.”

Gregg knew she was onto a winner when the first two books in the series, Mystic and the Midnight Ride and Blaze and the Dark Rider were published. Impressed by the sales figures, Harper Collins UK sent her another contract asking for another four. She also received her first fan letter.

“I thought, ‘Oh my god, someone’s actually read it and liked it enough to write a letter. And going to England and seeing the books in the shops there was really cool.”

By the time Gregg (photo above) had written the seventh book in the first series, she and her publisher were starting to talk about a spin-off. She’d just introduced Tara, the instructor, and wanted to use her in a series set in the US and UK. Pony Club Rivals follows a group of elite riders at Kentucky’s Blainford Academy. Using her own experience of boarding school for inspiration, Gregg created a world of fierce rivalry, tempestuous riding mentors and difficult boyfriends. Like Secrets, the books are rich in detail, immersing readers in all things equestrian. The boarding school setting, ala orphaned Harry Potter, also allows Gregg to ramp up the drama among the students, who don’t have parents around to rein them in.

“Horses are such big creatures you think, wouldn’t your mum go with you to pony club? I wouldn’t let my daughter go and just muck about by herself but you have to do that in the books because the kids can’t go off chasing whatever villain if there’s a parent there to stop them.”

There are four books in the Rivals series but Gregg has left things open for more. She is now taking a break from the series to work on a new book, based on a true story, due for release late 2013.

Gregg says the secret to her success is writing about a topic she loves. The hard part is finding the time and space for writing.

“I saw an interview with Jeffrey Archer where he said how much he loved prison. And I thought, yeah prison for a writer would be like a retreat. That would be fantastic. Michael [Gregg’s partner] said I should hold up the petrol station. Maybe I should!”