Every so
often you set out to get an answer to one question and end up learning
something else altogether. Something like that happened to me a couple of weeks
ago, when I was attempting to finalize the cover of my fourth mystery novel.
The cover
image, which I conceived and developed with the help of a very good graphic
designer, was to show a football field at night, with a lone pompon lying
forlornly in the foreground, suggesting a missing cheerleader. It’s a simple
enough concept in concept, but it took several attempts before I was satisfied
that the pompon was immediately readable as a pompon.
If readers
look at a book cover and go, “eh?” when they see it, that is not something that
is likely to increase sales. So, given the downside of being wrong, I decided
to get a few more opinions on how well the pompon image worked before I put it
out there on Amazon.
Unscientific, But Telling
I had the
cover image as a jpg and decided to email it around to a few friends to see
what they thought. I settled on three men and three women and sent it out to
everybody at the same time.
In the
covering email, I simply said that I’d like them to look at the book cover and
tell me in a line or two what they saw in it. It seemed to me like a
straightforward and unambiguous request, and I really wasn’t prepared for what
came back.
Two women
and two men replied within a couple of days, and the responses were clearly
differentiated by gender. Both the women wrote that they saw a football field
with a pompon on it, which was the answer I was hoping for. The men, on the
other hand, looked at it completely differently.
What’s the Catch?
Both of the
guys, interestingly, regarded it as a trick question, and in their response
tried to point out what they thought was the hidden flaw in the picture,
without making any attempt to describe the picture, which is what I was asking
them to do.
One of my
friends thought that the bench behind the football field shouldn’t have been
there. Another thought he saw someone peeing in the trees in the background.
Both of them said they weren’t completely sure of it and didn’t know whether
they had registered the trick in the photo.
Neither response was any help to me in terms of getting a confirmation
or denial as to whether the pompon registered.
One of them
subsequently wrote, in response to a followup question, that of course that was
a pompon in the foreground. Since nobody had said they were wondering what that
lump above my name was, I figured at that point that I was overthinking the
matter and that the cover was fine. My friends helped me figure that out,
certainly, but they also provided a valuable object lesson in yet another way
that women are from Venus and men are from Mars.
