'Unprecedented demand' for Rebel Girls 2, reveals publisher

The company behind the Rebel Girls series is already planning a second print run for book two, due for release next week, following “unprecedented demand” for the title, a spokesperson has told The Bookseller.

Eleonora Ossola, international sales director for Timbuktu, said that even though the initial print run for Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls 2 was 100,000 copies, a second print run is already under consideration ahead of the official release date of 28th February.

Copies of the second book will be sold through bookshops but also through the Timbuktu’s own website, where the company has no plans to offer a discount, even though the title has a r.r.p. of £25.

“We are trying to protect the product. There is often a rush to sell books at a cheaper price but we want to avoid that,” Ossola explained. “We are so close to our readers and we know the love for our brand is there.”

Like book one, Rebel Girls 2 features 100 mini biographies of women who have changed the world, with this edition featuring Oprah Winfrey, Mata Hari, Sappho and Maryam Mirzakhani, all illustrated by a female artist. Timbuktu is this time, however, breaking with Penguin Random House (PRH) to publish the book alone.

The company will work with PRH on coordinated marketing and PR activities that will benefit book one, but otherwise all aspects of the launch of book two have been brought back in-house. “We launched book one on Kickstarter raised almost $600,000 but there was such huge demand the logistics wouldn’t have worked,” said Ossola. “The company grew quickly so we can now cope with the demand ourselves. It’s an exceptional situation.”

Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, the authors and creators of the books, will be doing a series of events to promote the new title, including school visits, workshops and TV interviews. They are also launching a podcast on 6th March. Each of the 10 episodes wil last for 12-15 minutes and feature prominent voices such as #MeToo founder Tarana Burke talking about the women from the book.

Cavallo and Favilli launched a kickstarter campaign for the first book Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls in 2016, intially hoping to raise $40,000. After the campaign crowdfunded more than $675,000 Timbuktu teamed up with Penguin Random House to launch the UK edition. The book went on to become one of the biggest publishing successes of last year and has so far achieved sales of 256,545 copies for £3.12m in the UK (according to Nielsen BookScan) and one million globally (according to Ossola). Retailer Blackwell's named it its Book of the Year, while Foyles named it is Children's Book of the Year.

In an email to the Bookseller, Cavallo and Favilli (pictured below) said they were not daunted by the prospect of trying to replicate the success of first titlem but excited about the opportunities ahead. Nor are they worried about the number of copycat books that have been published in the past few months.

“Our legal team takes care of copycats that are blatantly infringing upon our trademark and copyright but in terms of the rest of the books following our lead: in most cases we're happy about them, as one of the goals of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls has always been to spark a storytelling revolution that would subvert the gender imbalance across media,” they said.