PRH bewitched by social media magician's middle-grade novel

Penguin Random House Children’s Publishers will publish social media magician Zach King’s first middle-grade book with an accompanying augmented reality app. At the same time, the publisher revealed Steven Spielberg had acquired film rights for the title.

Zach King: My Magical Life is the first in a three-book series. UK and Commonwealth rights were sold to editor Tig Wallace and commissioning editor Holly Harris by Rachel Clements at Abner Stein on behalf of CAA. Spielberg and his production company, Amblin Entertainment, have acquired the film rights.

King is a 27-year-old filmmaker who creates videos with a “hint of magic” and has more than 25 million followers across his social platforms.

A spokesperson for the publisher said: “King’s highly anticipated debut novel will mix traditional storytelling with graphic novel-style, full-colour sections all of which comes with a free downloadable augmented reality (AR) app that animates the illustrations, bringing them to three-dimensional life.

“Zach King: My Magical Life is a fun-filled middle-grade adventure for eight-years-plus-readers that chronicles a kid’s search for his true magical powers.”

King said: “The book started as a passion project to give an answer to the fans that would ask me ‘how I got my magic’. The story is a fun origin story for all the magic tricks that our audience has come to know. It's been hard to keep the project a secret from the fans for such a long time. I hope they enjoy reading it."

Wallace and Harris said: “We could not be more thrilled to launch a brand new middle-grade series that we know young readers everywhere will love. The full-colour illustrations, magical characters and immersive accompanying app make this one of our most exciting debuts this year.”