How It Works: The Simple Idea That Becomes A Bestseller
By pairing pictures from the Ladybird archive with amusing prose, Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley have taken the publishing world by storm, writes Alice Jones
In a poky, dark office above Holborn tube station sit two of Britain’s best-selling authors. In 2016, only JK Rowling, David Walliams and Jacqueline Wilson outsold them and yet most people probably don’t know their names.
“We have now written 39 books that are all in print and two of them have our names on the cover,” says Jason Hazeley. “The deal is, we’re backroom boys”, adds Joel Morris.
Quite successful backroom boys, though. Hazeley and Morris have now written 32 of their Ladybird Books for Grown-ups, sold over four million copies and been translated into 12 languages. Their irritatingly simple idea, back in 2015, was to pair original pictures from the Ladybird archive with new, typically bald prose that would explain concepts like Dating, Mindfulness and the Mid Life Crisis to the adults who had grown up with the books in the first place.
Their original pitch was The Ladybird Book of the The Hipster – “We reckoned we could sell 60,000 of them,” says Morris – which spawned further gifting perennials such as How it Works: The Mum and The Wife, The Ladybird Book of The Meeting, The Hangover and The Shed.
“They said to us, ‘Anything with the word shed on it sells,” recalls Hazeley.
“And we said, ‘We bet it won’t,’” says Morris.
“And they were quite right,” says Hazeley.
They must have made piles of cash, though they deny they are millionaires yet. “We are definitely thousandaires. It’s nice. It’s been a good chunk of money,” says Morris. “The thing that has been lovely is the royalties. As a freelance writer, all you’re ever after is a rolling income, to keep you going.”
Their main extravagance, it turns out, is the office we are sitting in – decorated with props from A Touch of Cloth, the spoof detective series they wrote with Charlie Brooker, a small toy toilet and a string of bunting which spells out “COMPETENT”.
“We worked for 15 years on cafe tables”, says Morris. “I can tell you where they plug the Hoover in in most of London’s cafes and pubs.”
Their other treat has been to buy up Ladybird original prints when they come up at auction. Hazeley has some from The Policeman, The Customs Officer and Learning to Ride; Morris prefers the “freaky, psychedelic” nursery rhymes and has one of Peter Pumpkin. When the last surviving Ladybird artist – Martin Aitchison – died in 2016, they went to his memorial service where they met many of the Ladybird family, including the original models for Peter and Jane.
Their latest batch of 11 titles includes surefire sellers such as How it Works: The Baby (“This is a baby. It cannot do much yet. It cannot speak. It cannot move around. It cannot look after itself or keep itself clean. And due to lack of sleep, nor can its parents.”), a surreal guide to The Rock Star which pokes fun at Prince, Adele and Michael Jackson, and The New You which somehow finds images to go with jibes about teethwhitening, wellness and selfimprovement. What’s next? “We might park it for a bit. We’re a bit tired and we’re running out of areas that are really profitable,” says Morris. “We’re happy with this lot and we’re going to sit until we desperately need to do some more.”
It takes them about three weeks to write each book. First they spend a week scribbling down everything they can think of on a topic, asking friends and family for input. Then they spend a week trawling the digital archive for images, then a final week writing and rewriting, handing their work across the table to each other when they get stuck.
There are 13,000 images in the Ladybird digital archive, but the problem is that not many have more than one adult in – and most feature white people.
“Someone in the Labour Party’s comms office complained to Penguin about The Hipster saying, ‘I cannot believe that there are no people of colour represented in this book’… Our answer
TOILET BOOKS “When our books came along, suddenly humour books came back. I used to love those books – they cheer everyone up”
would have been ‘have you seen the archive?’ There are some depictions of Rorke’s Drift in there but that doesn’t really feel like the ones we should be using,” says Hazeley.
They eventually found a set of books that had been published for the Caribbean market, called Sunstart, which were illustrated by Aitchison. “Peter and Jane are two little Jamaican kids called Ken and Joy. So suddenly we’ve got all these black faces we could use,” says Hazeley.
“We’ve got some Asian families in there as well, playing cricket. Suddenly we had a little bit of a modern balance of ethnicity. But it was hard work,” says Morris.
Hazeley, 45, and Morris, 46, have been writing together since their school days in Chelmsford, Essex, when they were excused from PE and tasked instead with typing up the school bulletin. They soon worked out they could do spoof bulletins using the same headed paper. “We’ve come such a long way,” sighs Hazeley, tapping a copy of How it Works: The Dad.
On leaving school they sold a joke to Russ Abbott – “It was 30 seconds and we got paid £15 for it,” says Hazeley – and thought they had found their metier. They hadn’t. “We did it for about six months, found it was really hard to sell a second joke and then gave up for nearly 10 years,” says Morris.
Instead, they both became musicians, until Napster killed off that income and they came back to comedy. They set up a spoof local newspaper website, The Framley Examiner, which got them noticed by Peter Serafinowicz, Jeremy Dyson and Charlie Brooker, among others, and began a career as writers for hire, contributing jokes and rewrites to everyone from Mitchell and Webb to Armstrong and Miller, Miranda to, most fruitfully, Brooker. Recently, they worked on the Paddington films.
The success of the books has given them the income to write a little less for other people. As well as the forthcoming five-part series of Cunk on Britain, developing the vacuous presenter from Newswipe, they now have two Radio 4 series in the pipeline – a Scandi noir spoof called Angstrom, starring Matthew Holness and a documentary about the phenomenon of the “toilet book”.
“When our books came along, suddenly humour books came back,” says Morris. “I used to love those books – they cheer everyone up. It revived the industry, which was dying.”
The pair previously had a hit in 2006 with Bollocks to Alton Towers – an offbeat guide to the UK’S tourist attractions. “We had nine years of lunches between that being the best-selling travel book of the year and the Ladybird books. I’m quite prepared to have nine years of lunches before the next one,” says Morris.
They have been offered other parodies – including the Five Go… and The Observer Book of… franchises but are keen not to be pigeonholed. “Also it felt like too much work. These are basically 1200 words long and each page is a very short story. That’s easy,” says Hazeley.
That said, the jokes are more sophisticated than they look. “When we got employed by them, the first joke we couldn’t do was anything that would affect the Ladybird brand as a children’s brand. We couldn’t swear, couldn’t put sex and drugs in. As a writers’ challenge, that made it funnier. You have to reach for the second joke”, says Morris.
The books also offer more insight into the writers’ lives than you might think – encompassing as they do the seven ages of man from baby to student to husband, father and grandfather. Morris’s brother-in-law who died is immortalised in The Midlife Crisis. “When we did The Mid Life Crisis we realised it was quite a howl of pain. It felt autobiographical, quite bleak and quite honest. We thought, we’re probably pouring as much of ourselves into this as we would do if we were writing a half-hour sitcom,” says Morris.
“That’s all you want as a writer – a nice format that people enjoy but has selfexpression in it. It’s the opposite of a hack job, we love doing them.
“It’s pure pleasure,” agrees Hazeley.