Trios: Diary Of An On-Call Girl, by E E Bloggs: Cover Story

Here's the latest installment in the Trios series about Diary of an On-Call Girl: True Stories from the Front Line, the memoirs of an anonymous police officer, P. C. Bloggs. Following on from his discussion of TV options and rights sales, today Dan Collins (Bloggs' publisher at Monday Books) examines the importance of good title and cover design. The final article, written by P. C. Bloggs herself, will appear next Monday and looks at the problems of writing her blog and book while still working full-time as a police officer.

Diary of an On-Call Girl is going to be serialised on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour next week, following an interview with PC Bloggs on Monday 15 June. You can listen to the serialisation between 10.45 and 11am each morning, Monday to Friday, and if you miss it (as if you would) there will be a repeat each day at 7.45pm.



They say you should never judge a book by its cover. Sadly, people ignore this. The story of Diary Of An On Call Girl actually starts with another book, our second. Called Wasting Police Time, it was based on PC David Copperfield’s Policeman’s Blog. It was all about the Gogolian, Orwellian and Kafka-esque scandal of bureaucracy as it affects the police – and therefore, the public – and it sold very well (nearly 80,000 copies to date, which is ‘very well’ by our standards).

After BBC1’s Panorama called to ask for our help in making a whole show about the author, we decided we were onto something; having struck brass with Wasting Police Time, we decided to try to repeat the trick.

WPC Ellie Bloggs, author of the PC Bloggs blog, wrote about similar issues to Copperfield – the pointless box-ticking, the cowardly arse-covering and the mindless management – but from the perspective of a woman officer.

Some of her stories were amazing – like the one where a mum reports her four-year-old son missing and then declines to join the search for him, saying she has a hairdressing appointment and demanding that the cops bring the child to her at the salon if they find him.

Her blog had a reasonable readership (if not quite PC DC’s tens of thousands), we had lots of people clamouring for a follow-up to Wasting Police Time… what could go wrong?

Well, something did: Diary Of An On Call Girl has sold far fewer copies than Wasting Police Time, despite being (I think) a much better book.

Why?

It’s not about the words in the book, which manages to be both extremely funny and also very moving.

As proof of this, take the reaction from TV companies: within a few months of publication, we had received six approaches from production houses eager to buy the rights so they could turn it into a policing comedy. They included Hat Trick (Have I Got News For You, The Armstrong and Miller Show) and Talkback Thames (Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge), and we eventually did a deal with Clerkenwell Films (this is John ‘Rebus’ Hannah’s production company, and they are currently working on a pilot episode for the BBC).

I mention this astonishing response not to boast (well, just a bit) but to show that, objectively, other people with great experience in judging literary works for their commercial value thought it was a good read (the BBC are making it a Book of the Week on Woman’s Hour this month, too.)
Could it be that people had just lost interest in the subject? I don’t think so – the national debate about police bureaucracy which Copperfield did so much to create continues apace, and a third book, Perverting The Course Of Justice by Inspector Gadget is selling very strongly.

Partly, I think the smaller sale is because Bloggs is a woman; a chunk of the title’s market would be police officers themselves, and they are mostly male, and, for some strange reason, men don’t seem to buy books by women (while women are happy to read books by men).

Mostly, though, I think we (by which I mean Monday Books) screwed it up.

We did this by getting both the title and the cover wrong.

The ‘On Call Girl’ bit of the title was meant to be a sort of play on the Belle Du Jour books. The jacket, equally, had a model (that’s not PC Bloggs) looking at the camera in a way which was supposed to convey the idea that she had a secret of some kind, but ended up just looking mildly suggestive.

Based on the two, I fear the potential reader may have been expecting the memoirs of a hooker who specialised in punters who like uniforms.

In the worst of all cases, many people wouldn’t be interested, and those who did buy it would have been rather disappointed.

So, misjudgments all round, though, in our defence, it was quite hard to get right. It is the novelised truth about life as a modern female police officer which attempts to make serious points about crime and society in a humorous way: how do you suggest that?

If we were back in 2007 and I could do it all over again, I think I would have called it Life On Venus (as a counterpoint to TV’s Life On Mars) and would probably go for a more ‘chick lit’ cover – probably illustrated and possibly pink… but I still don’t know if that gets it, either. We’re currently working on the follow-up (which I think will be called Life On Venus) and may well reissue DOAO-CG in a new cover. So any and all ideas for both are more than welcome! (The Gadget cover returned to the Copperfield style.)


Thanks to Dan's generosity we have three free copies of Diary Of An On-Call Girl up for grabs. If you'd like one for yourself you have to answer this question: what is PC Bloggs' day job? Email your answer to Dan at "dancollins at mondaybooks dot com". Make sure to put "HPRW Trios competition" in your subject line and include your address, and on Monday June 22 he'll pick three names at random to send those copies off to. It would be good if you reviewed them in a couple of places once you've read them: if you do, remember to post a link to your review here.

Guest Post: How Book Design Affects Readability

A couple of weeks ago I was talking on the phone with Maggie Dana (who comments here regularly as Mags), and she mentioned to me that as well as being a writer, she works as a book designer and typesetter. We talked about how good typesetting not only makes books so much more readable, but more desirable too, and more likely to be bought; and then our converstation moved on. When Scott Pack's name came up, I mentioned to Maggie that he'd sent me a copy of The Sonnets, which is published by Scott's imprint The Friday Project, and which was sitting on the desk right beside me at the time. I told her how I particularly liked its internal design, and felt that the typesetter had done a better-than-average job on it: the clever font-choice and careful spacing of the text on the page beautifully enhanced the measured flow of the prose. Maggie laughed, and told me to turn to the copyright page and there it was: "Typeset by Maggie Dana". After that I had to ask her to write me a piece about typesetting and here it is, for you to share.



Pinned to my notice board amid a jumble of typeface lists, dog-eared business cards, and photos of my grandchildren, is a sticky note that keeps me honest when I’m tempted to get too experimental or too fancy with a book design project. It says:

A typographer’s first obligation is to the reader.

This holds true for all printed media from newspapers to billboards, but nowhere is it as crucial as in a book. How many times have you picked one up, only to find yourself putting it back on the shelf and wondering why? Perhaps it was by your favourite author or had glowing reviews; maybe it was a bestseller with a gorgeous cover and a tantalising blurb on the back. But when you opened the book and began to read, you changed your mind.

Why?

More than likely it was the text design. Something about it got in the way of readability. It could’ve been an inappropriate font, not enough leading (space between the lines), or a visual distraction such as a page number halfway down each outside margin. There are numerous ways for the appearance of a book’s page to turn off a potential reader.

A book’s design (I’m talking interior page design here, not covers) has one major purpose and that is to make the words on the page end up in the reader’s mind as effortlessly and as seamlessly as possible. Doesn’t matter if the book is a novel, a textbook, a dictionary, or even a car repair manual, the principle is the same. If the reader is motivated to absorb the information but finds himself unable to do so, the design is not doing its job.

I recently read about a study conducted at the University of Michigan involving the complex interplay of effort, motivation, and cognitive crunching. A group of college students were given written instructions for a regular exercise routine. Half the students received their instructions printed in a plain, readable font; the other half’s instructions were in a decorative font that looked as if it had been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush. It was unfamiliar and hard to read.

The findings were remarkable. The students whose instructions were printed in the simple, unadorned font, were much more open to the prospect of exercising. Apparently, their brains equated ease of readability with ease of doing push-ups and crunches. On the other hand, those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes had no intention of heading to the gym. The reading had tired them out.

The instructions were identical; the only difference was the font, which boils down to this: a good designer will always use a font that’s appropriate for the task at hand. In the case of books, this means a serif font such as Garamond, Goudy, Sabon, or Times. A font with no serifs like Futura or Helvetica, while great for headlines and motorway signs, isn’t suitable for a book’s running text. It takes longer to read and it tires the eye. So will lines of type that are too close together or too far apart. Either way, you’ll find yourself reading the same line twice, or skipping one altogether.

It was my son Paul who really brought home to me the importance of good book design back when I first started in the business quite a few years ago. We were on the train, heading for New York where I had some appointments with publishers and he had a job interview. Paul, a freelance programmer who already had several programming languages under his belt, was adding yet another, and doing it in a major hurry. He showed me his textbook and said it was the best he’d ever read when it came to absorbing complex information. The design was crisp and clean, with an excellent choice of fonts and colours, plenty of white space, effective illustrations, and not too many bells and whistles such as icons, starbursts, and time bombs that seem to inhabit most computer manuals these days. Clearly, that book’s designer had done his or her job, and done it well, because my son, who had precisely three days to learn the new language not only landed that particular freelance gig, but several others as well.

So the next time you pick up a book, take a moment to examine the interior design and see if it appeals to you, if it makes reading the book a pleasure because, mostly, that’s what reading’s all about. Unless, of course, you’re trying to learn a new programming language in under three days!


Maggie Dana was born and raised in England, but has lived in Connecticut for many years. A book designer and typesetter, Maggie is also the author of six books for children. Her first novel for grownups, Beachcombing, will be published on 5 June, 2009, by Macmillan New Writing.