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‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love (www.theguardian.com)

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Archived version: https://archive.ph/HSmIX

‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love

Interview by Simon Hattenstone

Raised by a ‘scary’ father and a ‘terrible snob’ of a mother, the Tracy Beaker author has always understood the loneliness that marks so many young lives. But at 77, she’s never been happier.

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‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love (www.theguardian.com)

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Archived version: https://archive.ph/HSmIX

‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love

Interview by Simon Hattenstone

Raised by a ‘scary’ father and a ‘terrible snob’ of a mother, the Tracy Beaker author has always understood the loneliness that marks so many young lives. But at 77, she’s never been happier.

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The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games, from Jetpac and GoldenEye to Sea of Thieves (www.theguardian.com)

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Archived version: https://archive.ph/q7BZB

For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK’s premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.

Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers – brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim’s future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. “We chose [this] company’s name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games,” Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.

Initially, Ultimate focused on the UK’s predominant home computer, the ZX Spectrum, despite reservations about its technical constraints. “When the Spectrum came out, we thought ‘what a piece of garbage,’” proclaimed Tim Stamper in his 1988 interview for Crash. But the Sinclair computer grew on the brothers and its ubiquity (at least in the UK) led them to appreciate the commercial opportunities. Having begun their games-development careers creating arcade games in a minimal UK market, the brothers turned their talents towards this home computer.

For some of Ultimate’s longest-standing fans, their first game remains their best. Coded in under 16K, Jetpac was by necessity an uncomplicated game, but it perfectly replicated arcade-style thrills at home. Its hero – Jetman, who would become an unofficial Ultimate mascot – scoots from platform to platform, picking up pieces of his rocket before fuelling it up and heading upwards to the next alien-infested rock. “What puts it to No 1 in this review is the fantastic quality of the graphics,” noted ZX Computing magazine at the time. “But the thing that really caught my eye was the incredible smoothness of it all.”

Buoyed by the astonishing success of Jetpac, the Stampers created several more impressive hits for the Spectrum. Pssst, Cookie and the driving game Tranz Am all appeared in the summer of 1983, before Ultimate left the 16K Spectrum behind, moving to the heady heights of the 48K model. Lunar Jetman was released in the autumn of 1983 to massive praise throughout the dedicated Spectrum press. “Well, what can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate,” gushed one Crash reviewer.

Lunar Jetman was another smash, and the Stampers quickly followed it up with the brilliant adventure game Atic Atac. At the same time, with incredible foresight, the brothers were already investigating a new console emerging from Japan, “the Nintendo”. Ultimate’s contacts in the Japanese arcade industry had led them to this new, dedicated games machine. “It had colossal potential,” said Tim in the Crash interview. “We looked at this, and we looked at the Spectrum – and the Spectrum was hot stuff – but this was incredible.”

Tim and Chris spent several months learning all about what would soon become the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), while simultaneously working on a game that would redefine the ZX Spectrum and create a new genre. With six high quality games under its belt in less than a year, Ultimate had established itself as one of the UK’s finest games publishers. Incredibly, it was about to get even better.

In 1984 Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first adventure for a new hero, Sabreman – quickly followed by his second. Then there was Knight Lore. Presented in trademarked “Filmation”, the isometric graphics – a thing of cartoon beauty on such limited technology – predictably wowed reviewers, gamers and programmers alike. “I was handing over Match Day to Ocean when [Ocean boss] David Ward said I needed to look at this game they were distributing,” says Jon Ritman, the coder behind Spectrum isometric classics Batman and Head Over Heels. “I loaded it up and was just blown away. It was like a Disney film you could play … I didn’t even understand how they made the graphics overlay each other … cleanly as well, not in straight lines, but diagonals. It was just great.”

Like many of his peers, Ritman soon worked out and even improved upon the Knight Lore engine, so similar games proliferated, particularly on the Spectrum. The Stampers had an inkling this would happen: Knight Lore, and a considerable portion of its follow-up, Alien 8, were already completed when the company released Sabre Wulf. All these games received glowing reviews, and with its output now retailing at a pocket-money-busting £9.95 (compared to the average of £6-8 at the time), Ultimate was at its peak. So naturally, in 1985, the Stamper brothers decided it was time to bail out of the home computer market. Rival software publisher US Gold purchased the Ultimate brand, and the Stampers reinvented their company as the console-focused Rare.

It was the biggest switch in UK gaming history: the country’s most critically and commercially successful programmers (at least on the ZX Spectrum – things weren’t quite so rosy for Ultimate on the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC) had suddenly left behind the computer that had made them. Ultimate’s entire home computer catalogue appeared to be merely a calling card for bigger things. “It was sort of an introduction process,” said Chris in 1988. “We had to show Nintendo that we had the capability before they could give us the rights to go ahead and produce for their system.” After the video game crash in the US, the Stampers saw that the market was returning, and predicted that the Nintendo Entertainment System would be at the forefront of this revival. “We knew a market was going to boom in Japan and America, and we set up Rare to handle that,” noted Tim in Crash.

By 1988, Rare had released several NES games including the downhill skiing simulation Slalom, and action platform game Wizards & Warriors. The company was rapidly approaching 20 employees, one of whom was Ritman, the creator of one of the most revered homages to Knight Lore, Head Over Heels.

“They were very mysterious, mainly because they were so busy and didn’t have the time,” says Ritman. “They had decided to start this new company [and] there was this huge interview in Crash. So I called the magazine, got a phone number and gave them a ring!” Supremely confident, it never occurred to Ritman that Rare might not be interested in his talents. “Fortunately, they’d played my games. Years later, Tim told me he’d never seen someone so certain they would be offered work!”

Rare established a foothold in Japan via the US and its sister company, Rare Coin-it. After it reverse-engineered the console, Nintendo, impressed by its technical prowess, made Rare its first western developer.

And once established, the Stampers continued with their prolific output, focusing once again on a single platform.

By the early 90s, Rare had published more than 30 games for the NES. And then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-inspired Battletoads became its conduit into Nintendo’s next-generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). By now, so confident was Nintendo in its premier western partner it even entrusted the developer with one of its own properties, Donkey Kong. “[Shigeru Miyamoto] was admirably hands-off, actually,” recalled Rare’s Gregg Mayles in Retro Gamer magazine. “I mean, he handed one of his characters over to us, and we changed the look of it completely.”

Arcade beat-’em-up Killer Instinct followed, together with two further Donkey Kong Country games. But it would be with Nintendo’s next console that Rare would achieve its highest fame. Renowned today as one of the best movie licence video games of all time, GoldenEye 007 energised FPS gaming on consoles and, along with the underrated Blast Corps and manic Banjo-Kazooie, cemented Rare’s position in the top tier of UK games developers.

Then the 00s brought a new era of consoles, and Rare struggled to hit the heights of the previous decade. Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”

Like most enduring marriages, the couple found a way to manage the relationship. The Stampers may be gone but Rare continues today, tasting success again with a popular online pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Despite its travails, Rare is still a hotbed of talent. “With all the talent in the UK and with all those thousands of people writing games, I feel it should be UK companies producing the No 1 arcade games,” signed off Chris Stamper in that 1988 Crash magazine interview. “And then everyone in the world following that – because Britain’s got the best talent, without a doubt.”

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Bear escapes from crate in plane’s cargo hold at Dubai airport (www.theguardian.com)

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Iraq’s prime minister has ordered an investigation into how a bear escaped from its crate in the cargo hold of an Iraqi aircraft as it was due to depart from Dubai airport, leaving passengers disgruntled over the delay and causing a stir on social media.

Iraqi Airways said it wasn’t to blame for the bear’s escape and that the aircraft’s crew had worked with authorities in the United Arab Emirates, which dispatched specialists to sedate the animal and remove it from the plane.

A video clip circulating on social media showed the plane’s captain apologising to passengers for Friday’s takeoff delay because of the bear’s escape from its crate in the cargo hold.

Iraqi Airways said on Saturday that procedures to transport the bear were carried out in accordance with the law and with procedures and standards approved by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

The airline said the bear was being flown from Baghdad to Dubai. But a person speaking on the video clip making the social media rounds suggested otherwise, saying the aircraft was an hour late for its trip to Baghdad and that passengers were being asked to disembark until the issue was resolved.

Dubai international airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, declined to comment.

An Iraqi Airways official confirmed to the Associated Press on Sunday that the bear was, in fact, being transported to the Iraqi capital. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the matter publicly, declined to name the animal’s owner.

Keeping predatory animals as pets in Iraq – especially in Baghdad – has become popular among wealthy residents.

Authorities have struggled to enforce legal provisions to protect wild animals. Baghdad’s police have previously called on citizens to assist authorities in preventing such animals from being let loose on the city’s streets or ending up as meals in restaurant by reporting such cases.

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‘What we publish will stay with you’: inside a small but mighty literary hit factory (www.theguardian.com)

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Archived version: https://archive.ph/eK1Rx

The two-up, two-down terraced house on a cobbled Hebden Bridge street does not look like the headquarters of a multi award-winning publishing house.

There is no gleaming edifice, no sign and certainly no reception desk. The green front door leads straight into Kevin Duffy’s living room, the nerve centre of Bluemoose books, his independent literary hit factory.

It is at a cluttered table in the corner that Duffy has built a business with a success rate that billion-pound publishers regard with envy.

Each year, Bluemoose puts out no more than 10 titles, but a remarkable number end up in contention for major literary prizes.

Each author is handpicked by Duffy, 62, a self-confessed “control freak” from Stockport, Greater Manchester, who spent years as a salesperson for big publishers before remortgaging his house to start Bluemoose in 2006.

“We don’t publish a lot, but what we publish will stay with you for the rest of your life,” he promised.

It was Duffy who published Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, which has been made into a BBC series that was given five stars by the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan.

In March, Bluemoose won best northern publisher at the Small Press of the Year awards. In April, a Bluemoose title – I Am Not Your Eve, the debut novel by Devika Ponnambalam, which tells the story of Paul Gauguin’s child bride and muse, Teha’amana – was shortlisted for the £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, which Myers won in 2018.

Bluemoose’s current bestselling author is Rónán Hession, a former musician who balances his writing career with being the assistant general secretary of the department of social protection in the Irish government.

Hession’s 2019 debut Leonard and Hungry Paul, a funny and tender story about kindness, has sold more than 125,000 copies worldwide. A bestseller in Germany, it has also attracted fans in Hollywood – Duffy recalls receiving an email from someone claiming to be Julia Roberts’s agent while having dinner in the Old Gate, a Hebden Bridge pub.

“I deleted it, I thought someone was taking the piss. Then her PR person got in touch saying she wanted to get in touch with Rónán because she loved the book. I was spitting potatoes across the room. How wonderful is that? She just wanted to say thank you,” he said. Hession will not be drawn on whether Roberts is buying the film rights.

Another Bluemoose success story with a day job is Stuart Hennigan, a librarian from Leeds. Ghost Signs, an eyewitness account of the impact of the early days of the pandemic on those living in poverty, made the shortlist of the Parliamentary Book awards.

Duffy shares an anarchic streak with Hennigan, finding it hilarious when he turned up to the Tory-packed ceremony in a T-shirt that said: “Still hate Thatcher”.

Major publishers have too many shareholders and overheads to take gambles, said Duffy.

“They’re not going to take risks on working-class and diverse writers because they need to get their money back … when you’ve got a 40m-high steel and glass edifice on the Embankment, there are costs to be taken care of.”

Take Penguin Random House, he said, part of Bertelsmann, the world’s biggest publisher. “It’s a €30bn organisation. Every year, their CEO says that they’ve got to grow by 10%. That’s €3bn, every year.”

In contrast, Duffy remains Bluemoose’s only employee, drawing a “tiny” salary, working with five freelance editors, including his lawyer wife, Hetha.

He is happy that way. “I don’t want to be the next Penguin. I don’t want to be a huge business. I just want to publish eight to 10 books a year, make a bit of a profit and invest it all back into the business to find new writers,” Duffy said.

Running Bluemoose is a seven-day-a-week vocation. On an average day, Duffy receives 10-20 unsolicited pitches, usually the first three chapters of a new book, all of which, he insists, he reads. Perhaps four in a month will grab his attention enough for him to ask for the full manuscript.

Duffy insists that there remains a “class ceiling” in the publishing of literary fiction. LGBTQ+ writers are being given deals, as well as people of colour, he says, but working-class writers are not being heard.

“It’s been a problem in publishing for 40 years and it’s getting worse,” he said.

“The people making those publishing decisions, because of their educational background and their life background, are not reading books about people in the rest of the country.

“You know, 93% of the people in this country don’t go to private school. There’s a reading public out there that wants books about themselves and the areas they live in.”

Myers, he notes, originally signed with Picador, which would not publish Pig Iron, his third novel about a Travelling community in the north-east.

“Because, they said, ‘who would be interested in a working-class character from a small northern town?’ That small northern town was Durham, theological capital of Europe for 2,500 years.

“Pig Iron went on to win the inaugural Gordon Burn prize. Ben’s next book, Beastings, won the £10,000 Portico prize. Then The Gallows Pole won the world’s leading prize for historical fiction. Then all the agents were interested,” he said.

Myers then signed to Bloomsbury, but Duffy insists that there are no sour grapes, not least because Myers insisted that Bloomsbury keep the Bluemoose titles in print as part of his deal. “We still go out for a brew and a slice of cake,” said Duffy. “We wish him well.”

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‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers (www.theguardian.com)

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Archived version: https://archive.ph/Uz7ql

The famous Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly is a modernist/art deco building. It started life as a menswear store and has the feel of that sort of traditional shop that is fast disappearing. But this bookshop, like many others, is enjoying a very modern sales boost from social media.

Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.

But while very much an online phenomenon, BookTok is having a material impact on the high street, with TikTok now pushing people to buy their books from bricks-and-mortar booksellers through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online and support independent bookshops at the same time.

Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer: “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books. It’s driven huge sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including titles such as The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and authors such as Colleen Hoover.

“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”

Caroline Hardman, a literary agent at the Hardman & Swainson agency, says: “It’s driving the appetite for romance and ‘romantasy’ in a really big way, so it’s having a strong effect on what publishers look for too.”

BookTok was established in 2020 but this year brings new developments to a community which has so far been an organic phenomenon. This month, the winners of the inaugural TikTok book awards will be unveiled.

Users of the platform voted on a shortlist announced in May, with contenders for BookTok Book of the Year including Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart and Maame by Jessica George.

There are also awards for BookTok influencers, independent bookshops, books to end a reading slump, and crucially, Best BookTok Revival, which has brought older novels to a new audience. The finalists in the revival category include One Day by David Nicholls, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

James Stafford, a general manager at TikTok UK, calls the shortlist “a true celebration of the variety of literature that resonates with the TikTok community”.

Book awards typically boost authors’ profiles and can lead to higher sales. As BookTok is already providing remarkable publicity, it will be interesting to see how these awards affect the shortlisted authors’ sales.

In April, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, also filed a trademark for a book publisher – 8th Note Press. The company has appointed Katherine Pelz, formerly from Penguin Random House, as acquisitions editor. Her specialist area is romance. Nothing is yet known about plans for 8th Note Press, although some self-published romance writers have said they have been approached about book deals.

According to the New York Times, the new publisher will focus on digital books until TikTok launches an online retail platform – something the company plans to do in the US later this year.

There is concern in the publishing industry that BookTok could become focused on books from ByteDance’s own publishing house. If the company can also sell the books direct to its users, that has repercussions for bookshops as well as publishers.

But could TikTok replicate the magic it has wrought in influencing book sales with its own products? Alice Harandon, who owns the St Ives Bookseller, isn’t sure. Her small but busy shop in the Cornish seaside resort regularly gets shoppers coming in to buy BookTok recommendations. The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a frequent request, as is A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

“When traditional publishers try to muscle in on the BookTok market, it never seems to work out quite the same way as an organic, viral recommendation,” she says. “It works best when a good book that has already been out in the world for a while – and is genuinely good – finds a natural following rather than trying to write books for the market. It starts to look very commercial, and will turn some people off.”

Rhea Kurien is editorial director at Orion Fiction, one of the biggest traditional publishers in the UK. She’s interested to see if TikTok can become more than a marketing tool for authors. “If the BookTok effect on consumer buying behaviour wears off, what will they be offering their authors that other publishers aren’t?

“What has been interesting for me is looking at the self-published authors who are doing incredibly well because of TikTok. They’ve established demand for their books and, as traditional publishers, we can then get them out to even more readers. This is especially the case for authors whose books are very big in the US but less so in the rest of the world. That’s where UK publishers can help. I’m also just not sure the TikTok generation is one that wants to be steered this much by publishers.”

The reaction of BookTok’s key market will be crucial to success. The most recent Publishers Association research says that BookTok is overwhelmingly a factor in Gen Z reading habits. In a poll of more than 2,000 16- to 25-year-olds, almost 59% said that BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.

The report says: “BookTok and book influencers significantly influence what choices this audience make about what they read, with 55% of respondents saying they turn to the platform for book recommendations.”

One in three use it to discover books they wouldn’t otherwise hear about. It encourages diversity, with one in three readers polled saying they discovered books by authors from different cultures, and almost 40% being introduced to new genres by the app.

Bluemoose Books, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, is an independent publisher that first put out The Gallows Pole by Ben Myers, recently made into a BBC drama. Founder Kevin Duffy thinks that a new publisher entering the market is a positive step, but sounds a note of caution.

“My concern is that a bigger slice of the publishing pie will go to celebrities who already have huge social media profiles, and further reduce the opportunities of talented but under-represented writers to see their work published.”

BookTok has had a major effect on how the traditional publishing model works, and while Kurien acknowledges the fears of the creation of a small, elite group of celebrity TikTok authors, she thinks it’s a challenge the industry needs to rise to. “The disadvantage to TikTok’s influence is simply that it’s taking up so many slots on our bestseller lists, tables in bookshops and spaces in supermarkets,” she says.

“The rise of BookTok titles has meant less visibility for other titles, whether they’re longstanding authors or debuts. But I think it’s good for our industry to be shaken up at times, for us to reconsider what we think our readers want and to make way for these new trends.”

Judging by Waterstones Piccadilly, BookTok has created both online and real-life communities that warm the hearts of the booksellers. Waterstones says: “Girls are meeting up and having bookshop days out. They save up their money and come into the shop in gaggles, getting really excitable about what they want to buy. Their energy is amazing and their friendships are really strong, They’ve bonded over books and the things they love, and that’s awesome.”

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‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers (www.theguardian.com)

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