The #1 Killer of Good Book Covers and Websites: Design by Committee
Jim: Today we’re going to talk about the number one killer of good book covers and websites: design by committee.
Thomas: There’s an old joke that there was a committee in heaven. God decided to let the angels design one animal. So the angels formed a committee, and they all weighed in. They wanted to design something like a horse but better. What they ended up with was the camel.
The camel is a horse designed by committee, a lot of good ideas that together don’t quite work. There’s no good spot to sit, and it’s this awkward shape.
You have to be careful when you’re getting something designed. I see a lot of authors fall into this trap, whether they’re getting a new website or a book cover. They’re nervous about their design, so they ask lots of people for feedback. That’s a huge pitfall, because incorporating everyone’s feedback is like a chef asking, “What ingredients do you like?”
What happens when you take feedback from everyone?
Thomas: This person likes ice cream, this person likes peanut butter, this person likes tuna fish, this person likes ketchup, so you combine all of those ingredients into one dish. There’s no way to make that work.
You can make a great tuna dish, a great ketchup dish, or a great peanut butter dish, but they don’t work together. Letting an artist keep his or her unique voice is key, and yet it’s still important to get feedback.
Jim: It is important to get feedback. But if some people hate your book cover, if some people hate your homepage, thank them.
Thomas: But I want everyone to like it. I don’t want anyone to hate it.
Jim: I know we don’t, and we take input from people. But here’s the problem, we take input from people who aren’t in our target audience. I hate steak, so we’re not going to have steak. I hate seafood, so we’re not going to have seafood. I hate Thai food. Everybody’s going to hate something, and we end up eating tofu, and it just doesn’t taste that good.
Thomas: It’s like going to a vegetarian and asking how they want their steak prepared. There’s no way to make a vegetarian like your steak.
Often that’s what you’re doing, and it can be really hard, because if I’m an author, I want everyone to love my book cover.
So if anyone doesn’t like an element, I cut it out. It’s like the story of the man and the boy going to town on a donkey. The boy rides while the man walks, and people say the boy is disrespecting the man. So the man rides instead, and people say he’s abusing his son by making the boy walk. So they both ride, and people say that’s too much weight for the donkey. So they both walk next to the donkey, and people say they’re wasting the donkey. Finally, the man and the boy carry the donkey into town.
But good design turns off people.
Is it possible to please everyone?
Thomas: Good writing turns off people too. Look at the classics, the best-selling and most respected books, and you’ll find amazing one-star reviews from people who hate, hate, hate that book. We want to give you freedom to make people mad. As Jim says, and I’m quoting you here, “Love me, hate me, just don’t ignore me.” That’s so important, but it’s difficult, and a lot of authors are scared to take that bold step.
Jim: Thomas says, “The worst rating you can get on Amazon is three stars.” That’s basically people saying, “Eh, wasn’t that good, wasn’t that bad, it was okay.” That’s what comes from design by committee. Most people go, “Yeah, that works.” But you don’t want it to merely work. You want it to set off skyrockets, or crash into the bottom of the ocean. One of the two.
Thomas: That’s right, because when people hate something, they talk about it, and when people love something, they talk about it. What makes a book successful? People talking about it. If you can get people who love it and hate it into an argument, everyone watching that fight thinks, “I’ve got to read this book and see what the hubbub is about.” Now more people are reading your book, and maybe they hate it too, and they join the debate. That’s what makes it successful.
How do you get feedback without landing in design by committee?
Thomas: One suggestion is to only ask people within your target demographic. Who am I writing for? Am I creating a website for teenage boys? If so, I don’t want to know what my husband thinks of the website, or my wife, even worse, my mom.
Ask experts, but be careful even with experts, because there’s often more than one good way to design something. There’s more than one perfect book cover, more than one perfect website. But combining two different approaches is like mixing ketchup and peanut butter, they don’t mix well. If you’re writing for teenage boys, go find some teenage boys and put the cover in front of them. If you’re getting feedback from experts, tell them who it’s for, a fifty-year-old woman or a teenage boy, so they put themselves in that mindset before giving feedback.
Jim: If you’re asking teenage boys who are friends of your kids, say I went to my son Micah, eighteen years old, and asked him to show it to his friends. The problem is his friends know me, and he knows me. So you have to be clear, “You cannot hurt my feelings on this. I really need to know what you think.” If possible, get feedback from people who don’t know you, because you want critical feedback, not compliments.
Why should you keep asking why?
Thomas: Another tip is to ask why, several times in a row. People often won’t like something about your cover or web design, and they’ll tell you, but they don’t know why. If you don’t know why they don’t like it, it’s hard to fix. So, ask
Why don’t you like that image? “It’s too distracting.”
Why do you think it’s distracting? “I don’t like the blood on the guy in the picture.”
Why don’t you like the blood? “It makes me sick to my stomach.”
Now you can ask, do I want this cover to make people sick to their stomach? The answer may be yes. Blood dripping on your book cover may be exactly what you need to get people’s attention, unless it’s a book about Amish romance. Take your target demographic into account.
Do you implement the reader’s suggested solutions?
Jim: It’s easy to say, “What’s not working with the blood?” and they’ll start telling you what you should do about it. That’s where you have to be careful, because they are not the experts.
Thomas: It’s like someone bringing their car to the mechanic and saying, “My engine’s making a strange clicking sound, can you change the oil to fix it?” A good mechanic says, “I’ll fix the clicking, but I don’t think changing the oil is the problem.” Instead of telling you what’s broken, because that might hurt your feelings, people give you suggestions instead. Those suggestions are almost always bad.
So ask why. “Why should I do this?” “Because I find the blood gross.” “Okay, maybe we can make the blood less obvious, or move it back a little, still striking but not so gross, more thriller, less horror.” Then you go to your designer and say, this is a little too much Texas Chainsaw Massacre and not quite enough Abduction. We need to tone down the blood.
Jim: You’re trying to stir an emotion with the cover design or the website too. One question to ask people is, “How does this make you feel?” If someone says, “It kind of scares me,” that might be exactly what you’re going for. If they say, “It gives me hope,” you like that. Listen to how they feel about it.
Thomas: The worst answer is, “I don’t know, nothing really.”
Jim: Or”It’s good.” That’s when you’re in trouble.
How should you give feedback to your designer?
Thomas: First, realize your designer has feelings too. As an author, remember the first time you sent your manuscript to an editor, how scary and difficult it was to receive feedback. It’s the same for designers, they’re putting their heart into their work. Give clear feedback, the way your editor gave you clear feedback, but do it kindly. That will help you build a long-term relationship with your designer. I see a lot of authors who burn through designers, and that designer will never work with them again.
Thomas: Consolidate all your feedback. Instead of trickling it in, “Here’s what I think” one day and “I also think this” the next, often conflicting with each other, put it all in one document. At AuthorMedia, we ask clients to send all their feedback in a single email so we have it in one place and can have a conversation about it.
Listen for when your designer pushes back. Sometimes they’ll incorporate your idea, and sometimes they’ll explain why they made a different decision. There should be a good give and take in a designer-author relationship.
When should you just trust your designer?
Jim: It’s very much a partnership, a back and forth. Without that attitude, you can get into trouble. At a certain point you have to say, I’m the patient here. I haven’t gone to medical school for twelve years, so ultimately you’re going to know better, and if I don’t trust you, I probably shouldn’t have come to you for the operation. I should have gone somewhere else. At some point you have to let them be the expert.
I remember a postcard project where the layout and design looked beautiful, and then we went over the copy. The client was so unbelievably particular that we went over literally every word, and it took hours. I’d bid on the project instead of billing hourly, so I was losing money. I got to the point where I just said, “Yep, great, love that,” because he wouldn’t let me be the expert.
Thomas: We see that with websites often. If you’re micromanaging, making all the decisions, you’ve either bludgeoned your designer into submission, and now they’re just a mouse for you to move around the screen, which means you’re not getting your money’s worth since you paid for their artistic vision. Sometimes that means walking away and getting a different designer, because maybe you picked the wrong person.
But you’ve got to trust them. It’s like getting in a taxi. You couldn’t drive the way the driver drives, but the worst thing to do is reach up and grab the wheel. Or getting your hair cut and saying, “Give me those scissors, let me fix it myself.” Halfway through a haircut always looks worse. You have to trust that it’ll look better by the end.
Should you give design feedback right away?
Thomas: We almost require our clients to sleep on design feedback. We’ll have a meeting and say, “Send us an email tomorrow with your feedback,” because what they like one day they may not like the next, and what they don’t like they may start liking. It’s a lot easier to give one set of feedback than to keep changing your mind, which can be confusing and frustrating for your designer.
Going back to trusting the expert, ask questions. Say, “This isn’t quite emotionally gripping enough. What can we do to make it more gripping?” Your designer will start giving you ideas, which is much better than, “You need to add more blood,” or “Put an extra explosion in the background.” That’s like telling the mechanic to change the oil because the engine is clicking.
What battles do I need to fight when it comes to design?
Thomas: Then pick your battles. If you fight on every little thing, they’ll eventually just give you what you want. I learned this the hard way as a web designer. We had a client, and we decided to just give her everything she wanted. At the end, after every little change we’d made, she said, “I don’t like my website. It’s not as good as the other websites in your portfolio.” We’d given her everything she wanted, and she had micromanaged her way away from our standard of quality.
To do our best work for clients, we have to give them what they really need, not just what they want. There’s a time to defer and a time to fight the battle, and a good designer does both, giving in on some things and fighting on others depending on how important they feel it is.
Offer problems, then suggest, don’t demand, solutions. Say, “This is a problem, I think, and here’s what I think could fix it, but let me know what you think.” Deferring to the designer that way builds goodwill and gets you a much better design.
Some authors get much better book covers regardless of who they work with, because they follow this advice. Other authors, even working with expensive agencies, get poor quality because they practice design by committee and micromanage their designers.
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