Ahhh, the memories. I used to work in the Design & Production Department of a scholarly Press (my favorite job ever, but you could not really live on the salary). The, erm, “consultations” between Marketing and the book designers were both infamous and vociferous. From the cover in, the “look” of the book was the property of D&P. Oh the sample pages circulated to all departments, but it was a formality. The dust jackets, on the other hand, were considered to fall about 50% into the domain of Marketing, and they held rejection power over not just entire mock-ups, but upon individual elements therein. Hell hath no fury like a book designer scorned.
The most notorious example involved my boss. She was the Head of Design and Production, won awards almost every year, and had a remarkable love for her craft and an even more remarkable temper when things went wrong (there were 3 printers that refused to take our money because they had run-ins with her; I heard one say that he would rather go out of business than do work for “that bitch at *****). Anyway, she had cherry-picked a book off the Fall list to design herself. It was a high-budget coffee table book with some interesting design challenges and just screamed “award winner” if she could make it work. She was the kind of designer that gets obsessed with a book, and was the typical moody up-and-down mess while she worked and reworked this or that. She spent two whole days just messing around with the PMS books and paper samples and cloth swatches to get just the look she wanted. Eventually, the color comp went off to make the rounds of the other Department Chiefs for approval. The Marketing Director, returning to work after a 3 hour liquid dinner with some of his folks at the bar down the street, rejected the jacket design in 30 seconds flat, writing the critique that it was “Either too brown, or not brown enough. Try another color.”
There were loud discussions. There was yelling and screaming. Things were thrown. Items (but no limbs) were broken. Doors were slammed. Repeatedly. To no avail. Marketing had spoken.
–jack