Since having Jackie magazine named after her, children's writer Jacqueline Wilson has outlasted and outsold her namesake, writes Rosita Boland.
To have clocked up 10 million anything is impressive, but to have sold 10 million copies of your books in your home country alone is the kind of statistic most writers only fantasise about.
"I would imagine Random House have got their figures right," Jacqueline Wilson says, with quiet pleasure, down the phone from her home in Surrey.
Wilson is one of Britain's phenomenally successful children's writers, who have collectively helped to dislodge some hoary old myths, such as: a) you can't make money writing for children, and b) you don't get any respect as a children's writer. With J.K. Rowling a multi-millionaire, Philip Pullman winning the prestigious overall Whitbread Prize for The Amber Spyglass, and Jacqueline Wilson selling books by the millions, nobody is making patronising comments any longer about writing for children.
Jacqueline Wilson's books are both critical and popular successes. Among her award-winning titles are Double Act, The Lottie Project, The Suitcase Kid, and Bad Girls. She writes with a deceptively simple and chatty narrative style, and has a fine sense of pace. Many of her books tackle tough social issues - alcoholism, cancer, single-parent families, divorce - but her cleverness as a writer ensures that no storyline ever collapses under its own weight. Characters always come first, the plot or theme second.
"I never start off with a specific issue," she explains. "It doesn't work like that. I make up specific children and think about them and if they seem to be drooping or sad in some way, I work out what is troubling them."
One of Wilson's best-known books, Double Act, has been adapted for both television and the stage. The stage version, which has been touring Britain, is coming to the Cork Opera House, its only Irish venue. Wilson herself was so pleased with the staged version, which was adapted and directed by Vicky Ireland, that she admits to seeing it in London five times.
Double Act is the story of 10-year-old identical twins Ruby and Garnet, who, up to where the book starts, have done everything in unison. Their mother has died of cancer three years previously and since then they have been cared for by their father and grandmother, a tight little introverted family of four. Enter Rose, the wonderfully scatty, unconventional and flamboyant new partner of their father, and everything changes.
If Wilson was a singer, she could be described as having perfect pitch. As a writer, she hits just the right notes, variously capturing a child's bewilderment, sassiness, loneliness, exuberance and sometimes downright oddness. Double Act is written in the form of a journal, where each twin takes turns at recording what's going on: how their relationships with Rose and their father change, and how their own co-dependency changes radically over time.
You've really made it as a writer when your publisher allows you the financial freedom for inspired extras, such as a different illustrator for each twin. Looking at Nick Sharratt's and Sue Heap's drawings of Ruby and Garnet respectively is like looking at a spot-the-difference puzzle. They look exactly the same at first glance; it's only when you look more closely that you see the tiny but telling differences. Double Act is a funny and clever book, not afraid to be sad in places, and it won both the Children's Book Award and the Smarties Book Prize, and was highly commended for the children's version of the Booker, the Carnegie Medal.
Every book Wilson writes sells in huge quantities, and she is translated into several languages, including Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese, as well as the European languages. Her books are also sold in Australia, New Zealand and the US. Given these statistics, it's unsurprising that she has been approached several times by publishers asking her to write a book for adults. She actually started out as an author by writing crime novels, and wrote five of them - all long out of print - before turning to children's books. So far, she has always refused the invitation to write for adults again. "I'd rather stay writing for children now," she states firmly.
Has she ever considered setting one of her books in a country other than England?
"This would be a lovely idea, but I think to pull it off, I'd have to live there," she says. "It's hard to get voices to sound authentic if you are not sure of the actual surroundings."
Wilson left school early, at 16, and went on "a rather deadly shorthand and typing course". Then she saw an ad placed by D.C. Thomson, the Scottish comic-book empire, looking for new writers for a teenage magazine it was piloting. It was the 1960s and awareness of the lucrative teenage market was just beginning.
Wilson sent off several "humorous pieces about being a teenager", and the publisher liked them. She was offered a job in Edinburgh, where she wrote articles for several of the D.C. Thomson titles while still contributing to the pilot teen magazine.
"The journalism was a good training to be very versatile and turn my hand to anything more or less on demand, so I don't have too many problems writing a bit every day," she says.
D.C. Thomson had a tradition of giving its girls' comics a girl's name. Wilson was the youngest girl there, and since she had been doing such a lot of writing for the new magazine, when it eventually launched, it was called after her. Jackie was probably the most famous girls' magazine of its time, and was retired only a few years ago.
Whether that initial experience with D.C. Thomson of writing for a female readership had anything to do with it, the majority of Wilson's characters and readers are girls. Of the hundreds of letters she receives each week, she reckons 90 per cent of them are from girl readers, from all over the world.
"Little girls feel the same way about things, no matter what their cultural circumstances are," she says.
Interestingly, although she has been getting fan mail for three decades now, the contents of the letters haven't changed.
"They are still exactly the same," she says. "The child will say what books of mine they like best, they'll tell me about their siblings, their pets and hobbies. Because my child narrators talk in the first person, they often forget I am an adult: they ask me questions like if I'm allowed to stay up late or have my ears pierced!"
She gets quite a lot of letters from Irish readers, and tries to answer all the letters she receives, but is finding this more difficult as the number keeps on increasing.
Besides, her house is already in some danger of drowning under paper: she has more than 10,000 books, crammed into every shelf and corner. About one-fifth of these are children's books and picture books for young readers, including a collection of rare 19th-century children's books.
Among her own favourite children's books are Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith; The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett; and Maurice Sendak's classic picture book, Where the Wild Things Are.
"I think these books have lasted because they are very warm and lively stories with utterly believable characters, but I don't think they've lasted as well as they might have done," she says. "If the style is a little heavy at all, children these days give up a lot more easily. They don't like to struggle, even though you can get a lot more out of a book by doing so."
She admires both Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling, but for different reasons. Pullman "raised the profile of children's writing in the wider world. Philip's trilogy [Dark Materials] made people see there's a great deal of flexibility and depth to children's writing". Of Rowling, she says, with simple pragmatism: "She is so incredibly wealthy, she has brought prestige to children's writing. To be rich, really rich and famous, people think 'wow!'"
Fans can look forward to a new Jacqueline Wilson book in the autumn. "I've just finished a book called Midnight. It's a slightly strange book for me; it's a story about a girl obsessed with a particular fairytale book illustrator," she offers, sounding slightly uncertain. She needn't worry; this book is bound to work the same magic with readers as have her other titles.
Double Act runs at the Cork Opera House from Tuesday until May 3rd (box office tel: 021-4270022)