Just Answer the Question

            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.

The Marines and My Book Cover

            One of the less lovely aspects of self-publishing is that the author has to do it all. There’s no publishing house to provide the backup of cover design, writing the dust-jacket blurb, formatting the book for printing, etc. You can, of course, hire people to do some of this, but the results can be unsatisfactory.

            I’ve always taken the lead role in designing the covers of my mystery novels. I flatter myself that I have an above-average visual sense, and I have worked with photographers and graphic designers throughout a 40-plus-year professional career. So I usually come up with a concept for the cover, along with supporting items to get the project started, before turning it over to my go-to graphic designer.

            One of the things I like to do in this regard is take a photograph that can serve as a basic template for the cover design, and it was in the course of doing so that the story you are about to read unfolded.

The Best Laid Plans

            For the cover image for my fourth novel, I needed an image of a football field. I wanted the image configured in a certain way, with the field in the foreground, a yard-line number showing clearly, and the goalposts in the background.

            Such a photo no doubt exists within the stock archives available to graphic designers, but it could be hard to locate, and subtle distinctions in terms of what I wanted could result in a number of false starts.

            So I decided to take the picture myself.

            One of the high schools in our area has a football field with southern goalposts backed up by a row of trees. With no identifiable background, it could pass for anywhere. Monday night after dinner, Linda and I set out for that field to get the photo from the exact angle I wanted.

            We got to the high school, parked, and walked up to the athletic field. It was nearly deserted, the light was perfect, yet the picture I wanted was impossible. With football season long over, the field had been converted to soccer, and a huge soccer goal directly under the football goalposts ruined the shot.

Marines to the Rescue

            Off to the side of the field, on the track that circles it, I saw a group of young men in shorts and T-shirts, with a slightly older man holding a clipboard. Thinking he might be a coach at the school, I went up and asked if he knew how long the soccer goals would remain where they were.

            It turned out that the clipboard man was not with the school, but rather was a Marine Corps recruiter, who was testing several applicants to see how physically fit they were. He asked me what I wanted, and I explained that I needed to get a photo of the football goalposts without the soccer goal underneath them.

            “Oh, we can move that for you,” he said. And he ordered his recruits to push the soccer goal out to the 30-yard-line so I could get on the field and take my picture. The goal was on rollers, but was big enough and heavy enough that Linda and I couldn’t have done it. For seven husky Marines-to-be, it was a piece of cake. I got my cover photo, they pushed the goal back, and we all got about our business.

            So when Book Four comes out this fall, there will be a line in the acknowledgements reading, “Thanks to the U.S. Marine Corps, Santa Cruz Recruiting Office, for visual assistance with the cover image.” This is the story behind that acknowledgement.