Houston Author Lands on New York Times Best-Seller List With a Royal Flourish — Katharine McGee on Rivals

There could be champagne corks popping and confetti guns firing at a certain River Oaks address as author Katharine McGee has just learned that her American Royals series has landed on the New York Times best-seller list. This coming only days after her national book tour introducing Rivals, the third book in the series.

Both previous novels, based on the theory that George Washington was named king rather than president, quickly earned best seller status in the young adults division. Interestingly, a readership survey has revealed that the average age of McGee’s readers is 29 with fans ranging in age from 12 to 73.

Just days before the most recent best seller announcement, we sat down with McGee in her home to chat about the genesis of this fictional American royal family with two princesses, one who becomes queen of America, and a prince traversing the terrain of growing up in the royal spotlight.

How does a Princeton graduate with an MBA from Stanford end up in the imaginary world of an American monarchy? McGee allows that she had always wanted to be a writer and prior to studying for the MBA, she worked as an editor of young adults fiction in New York. And that is where the seed for American Royals was planted.

“It came to me from Prince William and Kate’s wedding so long ago,” McGee tells PaperCity. “A friend and I decided to go to a royal wedding watch party. The whole city felt like it was almost a holiday here.

“People were watching the wedding in bars. It was on the mega screen in Times Square. The wedding was on the front page of every newspaper and magazine. It was so interesting to me that we are so engrossed in this wedding of royals that aren’t even ours, which led me to ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we had a royal family?’ ”

Her boss at the time didn’t like the idea and encouraged her to pursue her sci-fi trilogy The Thousandth Floor, her previous best seller in the young adults reader category. That completed and a move back to Houston with with her husband, who is in commercial real estate, later, McGee won the go-ahead from her former boss who is now her editor at Random House Children’s Books.

McGee is already at work on the fourth and final installment of American Royals which is set to be released in 2023. But as that story line is top secret, we talked about Rivals, her sixth work of popular fiction overall.

She explains that writers can have more bandwidth, more fun with a later book in a series.

“By the time the book reaches the readers, they are familiar with the concept. They know the characters. They know the world and so I have room to play,” McGee says. “Book three, because of that, has been a really joyful book which is kind of unexpected because this is the book that I wrote during the pandemic, all of 2021. And I  had a new baby.

“It ended up being a really fun book because I wasn’t capable of writing anything that wasn’t a fun thing to write at the time.”

Katharine McGee isn’t giving anything away in Rivals. So for readers familiar with the story, the questions remain: What will Queen Beatrice encounter at the conclave of international royals at Versailles, what will happen between Princess Samantha and her love interest and how will Prince Jefferson deal with the competing attentions of two young ladies and the scheming of the spoiled Gabrielle Madison?

And then there will be book four. As for future books, ideas are already percolating in McGee’s imagination. But her writing time these days has to be planned around the demands of her 20-month-old son, her accommodating husband and their work on renovating a house in Tanglewood.