This
is a burning question I’m sure many of you writers are facing. I know it kept
me up many nights. In the interests of helping out fellow toilers of the pen I
have been encouraged to share my secrets. I worked with marketing whiz David Roberts and designer Polly Leddar who came up
with the cover for my novel Pangamonium.
This is what I learned in five easy steps.
Tip #1 – Size
Now
we all know that men obsess about size but really, seriously, no one is going
to buy your book if you slap a giant schlong on the front cover. Unless your
book is The Great Gatsby. Even if that is your personal preference you have to
remember that not every reader shares your tastes. Some of us want to be teased
a little rather than having our eye poked out.
At
the same time, if it is too small, well, we all know how effective that is. My
novel features a scene where boxes of vibrators are dumped out of a moving school
bus to stop the Army chasing the good guys. So we felt that a bunch of
vibrators on the cover would be a reasonable image. But when we placed them
around the other elements to scale – a falling elephant, man and gun – they
looked like tiny hand grenades. Obviously, that wasn’t what we wanted at all.
Tip #2 – Colour
Everyone
of a certain age knows that vibrators come in all types of colours these days.
But when your cover background is already Sari Pink it somewhat limits your
options. Since we had refined the cover to a graphical style everything else on
the front was black. And you know what they say – when you’ve had black there’s
no going back. So black it was.
Tip #3 – Shape
Vibrators
come in many diverse shapes today, and that’s a good thing, but not for a cover
designer. The shape had to communicate what it was, without confusing it for
what it wasn’t. Some vibrators are extremely realistic, right down to the
anatomical level, but we weren’t making a medical textbook or a manual on
schlongs. We wanted a symbolic sex toy. Polly fiddled experimented with various shapes until she
drew one that satisfied all of us.
Did
it succeed? One book review blogger, Dr Lara Cain Gray, thought so: “For
starters, I believe this is the first novel I’ve reviewed that has a dildo on
the front cover. It’s a subtle (ish) artistic interpretation of the
device, but it is there.”
Note
the qualification, “subtle (ish)”. ‘Ish’
because as Lara wrote, “Pangamonium
is a novel at once literary and low-brow”, and really, how subtle can you make
a dildo on the cover of a book before you’ve lost that huge market for
dildo-cover book readers?
Tip #4 – Position
It
was Polly who came up with the idea. Once we knew the tiny falling vibrators
looked like hand grenades, I asked her if she could come up with another
option. She had already created a unique font for the word Pangamonium, inspired
by an old Indian stamp. And the whole cover featured a stamp border, suggesting
an exotic adventure in a foreign land, which indeed describes the plot of my
novel. So she hijacked the letter ‘I’ in Pangamonium, which after all fulfils
the essential shape components, and turned it into a dildo. Voila!
Tip #5 – Tone
We
were nearly there, and yet we wondered if we had gone too far. How vibrator-ish
could we make this image while retaining our dignity? I loved the cover but I
asked Polly one last thing – could she find a way to introduce humour, while
also making the dildo an object of fun and not of lust?
She
went away and scratched her head and thought about what vibrators do, which is
vibrate. And the solution appeared to her in a dream – make the dildo ‘vibrate’
on the cover by drawing it in three closely overlapping shapes. Now the “I” in
Pangamonium really did look like a vibrating vibrator, and what’s more, it
looked rather cheeky, or at least I thought so. But then, I was the one who had
his main character get arrested when the suitcase he presented at the border to
Panga was found to be full of sex toys – and it wasn’t even his, starting the
mad, satirical adventure story with a heart of gold.
Also
the vibrator didn’t put Lara off, because she concludes about Pangamonium, “it
offers a comical and thought-provoking romp for any reader in the market for
some fresh, edgy, original fiction.”
Stop Press: Pangamonium long-listed
for the Commonwealth Book Prize 2013!
Find out more about Zanesh Catkin at his website.
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