While conducting a seminar on cover design for a group of editors, I noticed one of the audience looking distinctly disinterested.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This session is not relevant to me,” was the answer. “I edit a trade magazine and we sell the front page to a major advertiser. So I don’t have a proper cover – it’s just an advertisement.”
“It’s bad luck that yours is an ad for someone else,” I replied, “but every magazine carries an advertisement on its front page – an ad for the issue inside.”
The cover is not the first page of editorial, not just a pretty picture on the newsstand, not an elegant piece of design calculated to win media awards.
The cover’s job is to SELL, SELL, SELL.
And above all, to sell itself to strangers, since faithful regular readers will buy the magazine anyway.
To that extent, a cover is a recruitment poster.
Its job is to jump out of a crowded newsstand and grab the attention of passing traffic, to win new readers and to win back lapsed readers with the promise that this issue is really special.
Reader replenishment
No matter how successful a title, it needs to replenish its readership every issue to make up for usual customers who happen to be staying at home or travelling away, who are too busy with seasonal shopping or have simply decided they don’t want the magazine anymore. Or, rather more basically, have died.
Editors of the most firmly established publications find it difficult to accept that they have been tried, tested and routinely rejected by the vast majority of their potential readers. Why do so few of the 130,000 motor racing enthusiasts who rush to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix regularly buy Autosport (circulation 35,000)? Why does Nursing Times sell a mere 31,000 copies per week to the 670,000 nurses in the NHS? Why is Cosmo’s circulation limited to 450,000 when there are many millions in the young women’s market?
All three well-respected titles are known to these absentee customers and their content occasionally sampled. They’re all out there waiting to be tempted yet the longstanding verdict is: “Not for me – it doesn’t have what I am looking for.”
An element of surprise
The more a cover projects a routinely familiar image, the less it is likely to dent that view. That is why the double challenge for a cover is to be true to its brand and still offer the element of surprise that persuades all those non-readers to come inside and have another look.
Witness the issue of Q magazine that was the public’s No 1 choice in the voting for the recent Magazine Covers of the Year awards (see www.themaggies.co.uk). There was pop star Lily Allen (obvious enough) flanked by a pair of black panthers (very much an unexpected presence on a music title). The result: one of the highest selling issues of the year in a market in overall decline.
In its early mould-breaking days, Loaded demanded a second look by devoting a cover to a famous pair of eyebrows. Radio Times achieved a similar impact by requiring Eastenders’ toughest character to cradle a new born baby.
Financial publications tend to play safe. But the American BusinessWeek stood out from its rivals when the cover of an issue examining fears of an economic crisis used type that actually appeared jittery on the page, combined with an image of crossed fingers.
New Scientist has always been prepared to spend lavishly on specially commissioned artwork for its covers, often an abstract interpretation of a complex theme. But in producing a special issue on Japan, it achieved a startlingly different effect by spending nothing. A blob of red ink on white paper symbolised the Land of the Rising Sun plus a block of coverlines (none more than three words) promising an exciting menu inside – from the world’s fastest beers to high-tech condoms, from life-giving fish to robot nurses.
It’s the combination of imagery and words that makes for best-selling covers.
But it is the image that must dominate because that is what first catches the eye; the words then provide reasons to buy.
The winning titles in the Magazine Covers of the Year shared a high standard of imaginative design and sales impact but the great bulk of entries were disappointing.
Why?
Because their cover images tended to be buried beneath a mountain of words.
Watch the wordcount
Conde Nast’s Glamour magazine (employing one of the smallest formats on the newsstand) had Keira Knightley poking her head out of an assemblage of no less than 77 words of coverlines. The publishers claimed that a celebrity face and glimpse of one shoulder was enough to give a sales uplift of 5%. But at first thought, the issue might have sold even more had not all that type got in the way of showing a little more of what she was wearing – if only to justify a main coverline proclaiming “YOUR BODY’S SEXIEST CLOTHES”.
On closer examination, however, Keira turns out to have nothing to do with sexy clothes. A much smaller coverline next to her right ear reveals she is going to be telling all about, “My weight, Sienna & drunken auditions.” To confuse matters further, a slightly larger coverline arranged across her left bosom announces: “Stalker nightmare. He hid in my room while I slept.”
For some considerable time, publishers have been aware of findings that shoppers visiting a sales point with the general idea of buying a magazine (not picking up a regular purchase) spend between five and seven seconds looking at any one publication.
The very latest research suggests that our increasingly frenzied lifestyle has reduced that time by half.
How on earth could anyone work out the relevance of Keira to those three coverlines in just three seconds? Never mind wading through the other 50 words on the cover.
To be fair, Glamour was relatively economical compared with IPC Media’s Rugby World (110 words of coverlines) and NatMag’s She (109), Esquire (100) and Good Housekeeping (95). These are not so much covers as contents pages which tend to smother the cover image with a curtain of type. It is significant that all six winners chosen by the public in the various categories of the Magazine Covers of the Year had less rather than more coverlines.
In times of reduced consumer spending, it is understandable that publishers want their covers to offer value for money by promising there’s so much more inside. But this is counter-productive if all those words crowd out the image and weaken the overall impact.
A proud chef may be tempted to list every single ingredient of every single dish of his a la carte menu on a board outside his door in the hope of attracting passing trade. The reality is that if the restaurant doesn’t look attractive at a glance you don’t bother to cross the street and read the words.
An advertiser even faintly contemplating the unique privilege of his product occupying the front page of a publication reaching an audience measured in hundreds of thousands would be shocked to know that many, if not most, magazine covers happen by chance.
Quite late in the production cycle of an issue, someone will ask: “What are we going to put on the cover?” A trawl is then conducted of what is already prepared for press to find an attractive picture considered strong enough to make a cover. And that’s it.
Since it often fails to coincide with the strongest feature in the issue, a certain ingenuity is required in writing a principal coverline that justifies its place on the cover.
Or, confusingly, the makeshift picture provides the image while the strongest feature claims the largest type.
If the cover is to be a successful advertisement for the magazine, it has to be planned as an advertisement. That means the first ideas conference has to decide what upcoming element will not merely fill pages but will provide the most powerful reason to purchase, how compulsively that can be illustrated on the cover and what telling words will deliver a selling message.
The main coverline is not just another headline transposed to the front page; it has to be crafted as a sales slogan - designed to astound, to excite, to challenge, to intrigue.
Since advertising copywriters believe less is more, keep it short. Those three-word coverlines of New Scientist provide a masterclass in the art.
So, how many supporting coverlines?
Ideally, not more than four or five. Any more and the cover is merely listing routine ingredients instead of emphasising what is special about the issue – so restrict them to items hopefully identified at that first ideas conference as the strongest other reasons to buy, widening the interest of the big sell and hopefully including some offbeat element that will attract the casual buyer.
This can happen in the unlikeliest way. Attending a focus group of regular Elle readers, I was surprised when one confessed to having switched to Good Housekeeping the previous month. She was in her early 20s, well groomed, well educated – why on earth would the very epitome of the Elle girl want to buy a magazine more usually associated with matronly society?
“I was going to buy Elle as usual,” was the explanation, “when I saw that Good Housekeeping had a coverline about how to get a mortgage as a single girl. I’m planning to buy a flat so I bought that magazine for the very first time to find out.”
Not exactly as dramatic as a couple of panthers prowling about on a music magazine, but it goes to show that when it comes to covers, what is different makes all the difference.
