Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZfHr3

I am back on the job hunt. My recent role working with young people who are at risk of becoming involved with county-lines activities has come to an end.

I’m used to it. I’ve always worked short contracts. What I’m not used to is how hard it is to get a proper contract now with a decent number of hours. No one knows what the future holds so employers have become tentative. Any contracts that are given out are small – 18 hours a week, for instance.

I have enjoyed this latest job. What it’s really made me realise is that county lines and exploitation can be traced back to poverty and destitution. Young people are being exploited because their mums work on low-income wages and they don’t have any money. These mums can’t afford to buy them £100 Nikes or whatever it is they’ve seen on Instagram. One young person – a nice kid – I was working with was a phone thief. I asked them why they did it. Their answer: “I can earn £200 to £300 per phone. I’m at home with my mum, my dad’s in prison and there are mouths to feed.”

Rishi Sunak is on a different planet. He’s not seeing the poverty, the destitution, the high cost of living that normal people are experiencing. The cost of living is still affecting me and everybody else but there is also clearly greedflation. There are things I simply refuse to buy now. I saw Bisto gravy granules in Asda for £4. Are you mad? They used to be £2.50. The company that owns Bisto has just announced a 21% rise in sales. The Nescafé cappuccino sachets I used to like for £2.50 are now £3 in Sainsbury’s. Domestos bleach was always £1. Now it’s £1.50. I refuse. I just buy the rubbish stuff instead. I feel like I’m being mugged off. The only power you have is to say no.

We are being squeezed. To me there is something really evil about doing this to consumers; money is being made off our backs. I might be working but I feel like I’m not reaping the whole benefits of my salary.

I don’t even know who I am going to vote for. Keir Starmer has said he is not going to change the policy on the two-child benefit cap. What is the point of voting for a progressive party if they are not going to make change? That policy is what has driven so many children into poverty. Then there’s the way Rishi Sunak has spoken about immigration. He has used the term migrants when we should be talking about helping refugees. He talks about them like they are some new species that is overtaking us.

I went to the theatre the other day with my niece. It was a folk play. I’m part of a literary group so I get free tickets. Our seats were in the corner. There was a couple seated there before us. I said: “Excuse me, these are our seats.” She kept staring at me, not watching the play. In the second half she swapped seats with her partner. When the show finished, I said to her: “I’m sorry that my black skin made you uncomfortable.” What else could it have been?

Racism has been tolerated by the government, especially with the way they talk about refugees like there’s an invasion. I’m going to start calling it out. I’m tired of being judged as soon as people see the colour of my skin.

On a positive note, I’ve got a role in a play called Bread and Roses, part of the Untold Stories series in Enfield. It covers suffragettes and going to war, but also deals with homelessness, eviction and the cost of living. I rehearse every Sunday. I feel like I’m getting to do what I want. Even though I’m not acting full-time, I’m still engaged in it, still performing.

Sharron Spice is in her 30s and lives in London

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

Once again, the spectre of the “motorist” is haunting Westminster. The Conservatives’ narrow win in last month’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection has been pinned – perhaps somewhat speciously – on widespread alarm about the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone, and from that, all else follows. A move against 20mph speed limits and low-traffic neighbourhoods is now reportedly in the government’s sights. A huge chunk of the media, meanwhile, loudly speaks for parts of the population who are supposedly addicted to asphalt, petrol and zooming from A to B with as little obstruction as possible.

Amid all the resulting noise, a huge story about transport goes almost unnoticed: the ongoing decline of buses, and how poorly prepared for the future it leaves us. After nearly 40 years of deregulation and outsourcing, and nearly 15 years of the cuts and shortfalls imposed by Whitehall on local authorities, the mode of travel that still accounts for 69% of journeys by public transport is in an ever-worsening mess. The relevant statistics are stark, and sad: in 2002, for example, there were just over 18,000 numbered bus routes in England, but that number has since fallen to just under 11,000, with more cuts seemingly arriving every month. There are few symbols of the literal privatisation of everyday life more potent than unloved bus shelters adorned with emptying timetables, now such a fixed part of the average British streetscape that their fading away is taken pretty much for granted.

The relevant news stories are everywhere. The people in charge of the South Yorkshire mayoral combined authority – which includes Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham – are warning of “horrible” cuts, which will mean increases to fares for children and young people. In Kent, where the county council says its bus system is “broken”, there will soon be cuts to services in such places as Maidstone, Folkestone and Ashford. Last month, 20 routes in County Durham and Darlington were scrapped, amid claims that the bus company Arriva was holding local councils “to ransom”.

There are similar stories in Stoke-on-Trent, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Essex and more. Dig into many of them, and you alight on a truth that all the talk about passionate “motorists” rather ignores: the fact that many car owners are not avid petrolheads, but people forced to drive by the paucity of public transport. Near where I live, for example, the villages and towns in and around the old Somerset coalfield have recently suffered drastic bus cuts. Back in February, a local news report included the views of a woman who lives in the village of Farmborough, only eight miles from Bath and 10 miles from Bristol. “I would rather use the bus to travel but the service has been cut back so many times it became impossible to rely on it,” she said. “If you live in the surrounding villages there is no option but to use a car – if you have access to one.”

Two years ago, the usual quiet about these local tragedies was broken by a new national bus strategy for England, titled “bus back better”. Driven by that alleged bus lover Boris Johnson, its creation was a belated consequence of the Brexit referendum highlighting the predicament of so-called “left-behind” places. It also spoke to unavoidable aspects of the present and future: our ageing population, the spurning of the car by younger people and the demands of net zero. Johnson presented it with his customary hype, including a promise of services that “run so often that you don’t need a timetable”.

But the £3bn that was pledged turned out to be closer to £1bn. Areas were forced to bid for money from Whitehall; less than half of the 79 local transport authorities that asked for money were successful, and – as the tireless pressure group Campaign for Better Transport soon revealed – even the winners received only 24% of the money they jointly required. In everyday terms, that meant that a crisis made much worse by the pandemic was allowed to grind on, following a grimly familiar pattern. Once timetables are hacked down and departure and arrival times defy logic, dwindling passenger numbers fall into a kind of feedback loop. And in that context, even the government’s most welcome move – the £2 cap on most local bus fares in England outside London, introduced in January this year and set to rise to £2.50 in November – only scratches the surface of the problem.

In some places, there are signs of hope. Thanks to dogged work by the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, the autumn will see the first phase in the creation of that region’s Bee Network – the London-style system of integrated local transport focused on yellow buses brought back under public control – which ought to offer an example for plenty of other areas to follow. In Oxfordshire, the first of 159 new electric buses will arrive next month, providing at least a flash of what the near-future ought to look like. Last year, Cornwall introduced a fare-cutting pilot backed by a £23.5m grant from the Department for Transport aimed at prising people out of their cars, which includes reductions in travel costs of up to 40% and £20 tickets that extend across a whole week.

These moves reflect some of the same sense of possibility expressed by Labour’s spirited shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, who is promising the biggest reform to the bus sector in 40 years. If Labour gets in next year, she says, franchising – in other words, restoring the control of routes and timetables to councils – will be concertedly extended beyond regions that have mayors to all local transport authorities. Councils will also be able to establish municipal bus companies. Such, she insists, will be the death knell of an absurd and inadequate system, crystallised in one inescapable fact – that, as she puts it: “We’re the only country in the developed world which hands operators power over routes, fares and services with no say for communities.”

There is only one problem: Labour’s current rigid insistence on fiscal restraint. A reliable and modern bus system needs money: not to be casually sprayed around, but carefully invested in better services, cheaper fares, green vehicles and dedicated staff. The alternative is what we currently have: decaying public transport, amid glaring symbols of the gap between a lucky few who can glide to wherever they fancy and the impossibilities that regularly hit the rest of us. The prime minister, for example, not only fixates on the “motorist”, but delights in travelling by helicopter and private jet. Millions of people, by contrast, have daily difficulties simply getting to work: a perfect illustration not just of a fraying society, but why buses ought to be right at the heart of our politics.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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

Britain’s “wonkiest pub”, which dates back to 1765, has been gutted by fire just days after being sold to a private buyer for alternative use.

Firefighters were called on Saturday night to The Crooked House pub, in Himley near Dudley in the West Midlands, which gained its name after it started sinking into the ground due to mining subsidence in the area.

Roads around the area were closed as smoke and flames could be seen pouring from the Grade II-listed building.

A spokesperson for Staffordshire fire and rescue service said several crews attended a severe fire at the pub and tried to extinguish the blaze. An investigation into the cause of the fire was already under way, they said.

The building was originally a farmhouse, and became a public house in about 1830, originally named The Siden House, with “siden” meaning “crooked” in the local Black Country dialect.

It was deemed unsafe in the 1940s and was scheduled for demolition, before it was bought by Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries which used buttresses and girders to make the structure safe while maintaining its lopsided appearance.

It had been a tourist attraction ever since, thanks to its distinctive appearance and optical illusions created by the wonky structure, such as coins and marbles appearing to roll uphill along the bar.

It’s former owner, the British pub and hotel operator Marston’s, put the pub up for sale this year with a guide price of £675,000.

An update post on the pub’s Facebook page on 27 July said: “The Crooked House has been sold. Unlikely to open its doors again. Marston’s have sold the site to private buyer for alternative use, that is all we know. This is just to update the page so nobody makes any wasted journeys to the site.”

A petition to save the pub from redevelopment, launched on 29 July, had attracted more than 3,500 signatures.

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.”

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.”

Police say they plan to charge US YouTuber Kai Cenat after a video games console giveaway event he organised sparked mayhem in New York.

Thousands of people rampaged through Union Square in anticipation of free PlayStation 5 devices, hurling bottles, stones and tins of paint.

Mr Cenat could be charged with multiple counts of inciting a riot and unlawful assembly.

Police say they made more than 60 arrests.

People first gathered at about 13:00 local time (17:00 GMT) after Mr Cenat posted on social media - where he has more than 10 million followers and subscribers - that he would be handing out 300 PlayStations.

By 15:00, hundreds had piled on to streets surrounding one of New York's busiest train stops.

They climbed cars and the train station entrance's roof and threw bottles at responding police officers.

During a livestream inside a vehicle near Union Square as the disorder was unfolding, Mr Cenat said: "They're throwing tear gas out there.

"We're not going to do nothing until it's safe. Everybody for themselves, because it's a war out there man."

Mr Cenat was taken into police custody at around 17:00. The crowd was finally dispersed about an hour later.

According to a CBS affiliate, Mr Cenat did not have a permit for the event, which was reportedly a collaboration with Bronx YouTube star Fanum.

NYPD chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey said: "We have encountered things like this before, but never to this level of dangerousness, where young people would not listen to our commands."

He added: "You had people walking around with shovels, axes and other tools from the construction trade.

"In addition, individuals were also lighting fireworks. They were throwing them towards police and they were throwing them at each other."

Mr Cenat made headlines in March after he broke the record for attracting the most Twitch subscribers by reaching 300,000.

Twitch is a livestreaming platform, where people typically play video games while chatting to viewers.

In the build-up to breaking the record, Mr Cenat launched a round-the-clock drive to boost his subscribers - chatting, gaming and interviewing guests, as well as sleeping, all on camera - for 30 days.

Police say they plan to charge US YouTuber Kai Cenat after a video games console giveaway event he organised sparked mayhem in New York.

Thousands of people rampaged through Union Square in anticipation of free PlayStation 5 devices, hurling bottles, stones and tins of paint.

Mr Cenat could be charged with multiple counts of inciting a riot and unlawful assembly.

Police say they made more than 60 arrests.

People first gathered at about 13:00 local time (17:00 GMT) after Mr Cenat posted on social media - where he has more than 10 million followers and subscribers - that he would be handing out 300 PlayStations.

By 15:00, hundreds had piled on to streets surrounding one of New York's busiest train stops.

They climbed cars and the train station entrance's roof and threw bottles at responding police officers.

During a livestream inside a vehicle near Union Square as the disorder was unfolding, Mr Cenat said: "They're throwing tear gas out there.

"We're not going to do nothing until it's safe. Everybody for themselves, because it's a war out there man."

Mr Cenat was taken into police custody at around 17:00. The crowd was finally dispersed about an hour later.

According to a CBS affiliate, Mr Cenat did not have a permit for the event, which was reportedly a collaboration with Bronx YouTube star Fanum.

NYPD chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey said: "We have encountered things like this before, but never to this level of dangerousness, where young people would not listen to our commands."

He added: "You had people walking around with shovels, axes and other tools from the construction trade.

"In addition, individuals were also lighting fireworks. They were throwing them towards police and they were throwing them at each other."

Mr Cenat made headlines in March after he broke the record for attracting the most Twitch subscribers by reaching 300,000.

Twitch is a livestreaming platform, where people typically play video games while chatting to viewers.

In the build-up to breaking the record, Mr Cenat launched a round-the-clock drive to boost his subscribers - chatting, gaming and interviewing guests, as well as sleeping, all on camera - for 30 days.