Malaysia's Answer to Harry Potter?

Demand has been so hot for this local series that Popular Bookstores now takes up to 500 copies of its new releases, as opposed to its usual practice of ordering a maximum of 10 copies per title for each outlet....The first batch ordered always exceeds 4,500 copies, and all will be sold within a month. ... To date, the first book titled Seven Days has sold more than 30,000 copies since its release in 2006 – even at the relatively high price of RM20 per copy. ... The success of the series has stunned everyone from writers and editors to publishers, all of whom thought books with 80,000 to 100,000 characters sprawled over 300 pages without illustrations would never get the attention of young readers.

It was so nice to read about the runaway success of a local Chinese children's author, Khor Ewe Pin, in a piece by Yip Yoke Teng in today's Starmag. This teacher and textbook writers says that he noticed that there seemed to be a literary void for older children reading in Chinese. He studied how Rowling's novels were written ... and it seems that some of the magic dust rubbed off on him too.