Cheetah Girls Music Group

By all rights, Deborah Gregory should be sitting pretty: As a first-time author, she wrote the Cheetah Girls novels, a bubbly, 16-book series that became hugely popular with American tweens and teens. And she appeared to hit an even bigger jackpot when she sold the dramatic rights to the Disney Channel. Her breezy, street-smart tales of five girls chasing pop music careers were turned into two hit television movies, and a third is now being filmed in India.

IF you're old enough to legally drink alcohol, you probably haven't heard of the CD that music retailers are hoping will boost their all-important year-end numbers. It's already on retail shelves, but it hasn't gotten much attention from MTV or VH1, or in the pages of Rolling Stone or Spin magazines. Instead, try the Disney Channel. "The Cheetah Girls 2" may be this year's biggest seller, if history is a guide.

EVEN over the phone, it was obvious that the Cheetah Girl was wincing. "I'm sorry, I know we're supposed to do this interview right now," Kiely Williams said, "but I'm getting my hair done, and it hurts. It really, really hurts. I'm hurting. Can we do this another time?" Well, at least that saves us the trouble of trying to conjure some new metaphor to describe the painful process of creating pop stars.