Maximags » Publishing

Sell, sell, sell, your magazine with the best cover you can create

admin — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:39:23 +0000

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.

Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk

First published: InPublishing Magazine Mar/Apr 2010

New-look Observer Magazine fails again

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:34:48 +0000

Why, oh why, can’t the Observer produce a decent colour magazine?

Over the years it’s had more re-launches than the Cromer lifeboat and still produces a sinking feeling every Sunday morning.

Possibly because the Observer has never really had its heart in it.

While the Sunday Times Magazine and the Telegraph Magazine (appearing on Friday, Sunday and Saturday in turn) eagerly embraced the miracle that was coloured ink on glossy paper nearly half-a-century ago, the Observer trailed reluctantly behind – going through the motions of giving its readers a colour supplement but never investing it with any real personality or sense of purpose.

How ironic that our most radical Sunday has always turned out the least adventurous magazine.

The same contradiction is apparent in its latest incarnation.

Cash-strapped as ever, the Observer has trimmed its Sunday package to three items – the main Newspaper, the so-called New Review, and the Magazine. While the parent newspaper continues to utilise the Berliner page-size even more effectively than its Guardian stablemate, the New Review takes a giant further stride in dramatising the format.

Spectacular images, eye-catching headings soaring in generous white space, crisply marshalled text and boldly defined sections – they all combine to create an IMAX big screen effect on little ol’ newsprint.

Turning to the second issue of the new look Magazine is like squinting through the wrong end of a telescope. Shorter and narrower than its rivals to begin with, the design is determined to make the content even more distant and cramped.

Only one picture in 60 pages crosses the gutter to make a genuine spread. The only other photographs to make even a single page are of a plate of meatballs, three out-of-focus workmen standing around a baby car, and a solitary figure posed beneath display panels of flight departures in an air terminal.

In face of all established flat-planning, the opening feature runs for 3,500 words through four text-heavy pages, illustrated by one small picture and a second even smaller – while the cover story is only to be found at the very end of the issue and is another 5,000 words of pretty solid text. And in between are no less than 13 single-page features, robbing the general run of the magazine of any real substance.

The Sunday Times Magazine continues to set the standard with elegantly displayed pages that marry words and images in an expansive pattern that positively pulls the reader into each and every spread. What a pity that the Observer Magazine seems to want to label its pages with the warning: Keep Out!

Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk

Rupert Murdoch’s big multi-media mistake

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:24:00 +0000

A case of digital schizophrenia?

What on earth is Rupert Murdoch thinking about? Tilting at windmills in a hopeless quest to get the genie of free-news-online back into the bottle of paid-for-ink-on-newsprint, he is neglecting an elementary way of persuading website browsers to go out and actually buy his papers.

This morning’s copies of The Times carry an outstanding candidate for Magazine of the Year – its own science publication, Eureka, which is a masterly exercise in combining authoritative content which imaginative presentation. With only 12 pages of advertising to carry a 60-page issue, it is a bold and clearly very expensive venture.

The four-page centre-placed gatefold in the latest issue is a panoramic depiction of 70 million years of environmental upheavals which no computer screen is wide enough accommodate. It is a vivid piece of artwork worthy to grace every school and every child’s bedroom wall. This alone is well worth the £1 for the parent paper and, brought to the notice of literally millions of online strangers, could well have created a massive extra demand.

So what is The Times making of this enormous opportunity to put on sales? Well, people who actually buy the paper can’t miss the larger banner across the top of the front page, announcing the presence of Eureka inside.

But the many, many more who prefer a free visit to timesonline will hardly know of its existence. It’s not mentioned at all on the Home Page even though the second lead is a scientific story. That merely X-refs to two other related items on the website.

Clicking to the Science section, we find a small panel which baldly announces the existence of the magazine and nearby is a shot of the cover. Except this is last month’s cover!

Nowhere is there an exciting sell for this month’s contents, no traditional Fleet Street promotional blurb for something as special as that panoramic pull-out.

And even worse, beneath the out-of-date cover is the promise that if you don’t happen to have bought the printed Eureka the whole of the magazine will there to read online page by page as an e-zine

What kind of marketing strategy is this? Does timesonline actively want to discourage the newspaper’s efforts to hold up circulation by offering expensive free extras? Does the right hand really care what the left hand is doing?

I am afraid The Times is not alone in this case of digital schizophrenia.

Surveys by multi-media students of Bournemouth University of the relationship between national newspapers and their websites consistently show the papers competing with each other in the profusion of directions to all the extra delights to be found online while their websites loftily ignore such vulgar offerings as the wallcharts, pamphlets, CDs and DVDs on offer at the news-stands.

This is an issue that dwarfs talk of attempts to claw back pennies from browsers. It’s time the industry realised that instead of using the great reach of the web as a vast recruitment opportunity they are going to enormous trouble to persuade the readers they’ve got that there’s no longer any reason to put their money down for a newspaper.

Would Rupert Murdoch ever buy Harrods and then stick a notice on the front door saying “Shoplifters welcome”?

Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk

Why magazines will flourish in the digital age

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:50:39 +0000

Re Post-Medium Publishing

In his essay on Post-Medium Publishing (http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html) Paul Graham presents many reasons why consumers in a digital age will not be prepared to pay for content – then confesses he’s not sure what “content” means. To him the word suggests “undifferentiated slurry.”

To publishers and broadcasters the word is very clearly differentiated by way of the three missions they seek to perform:

(a) To Inform

(b) To Educate

If that seems a pompous formula for the current world of media that encompasses redtop tabloids and lurid soap operas, celebrity magazines and public executions by reality TV, it’s because it embraces the lofty principles laid down at the birth of the BBC more than 70 years ago.

The formula still holds good but is now interpreted in more basic terms:

(a) News (what’s going on?)

(b) Analysis and Comment (what’s to be learned from what’s going on and what does it mean?)

In failing to distinguish those three strands, Paul Graham not surprisingly found himself floundering in a slurry pit of contradictions. And in regarding Content as a single commodity he could not recognises that consumers approach each element in a different mind-set.

News: No one in publishing (not even Rupert Murdoch) expects people to pay for online News any more than they would pay for bottled oxygen. News is happening everywhere and all the time and electronic media can deliver it to everyone wherever they are in next to no time. At best, ink on paper delivers last night’s news.

The staccato patterns of online traffic shows that the great mass of people go to the web for a quick fix of information – keeping up with what’s happening from whatever sources they stumble upon. They put no greater value on it than sharing in the office gossip. And no one would dream of paying for that.

Analysis and Comment: If News has to equate with the provision of free parking outside the store, newspapers have a much stronger case for charging customers to come inside and linger over the fruits of their costly investment in eminent editors, special correspondents and investigative journalists. Analysis and Comment cater for people who need to know much more than what’s happening and where there’s a need people will pay.

Pleasure: Another confession of Paul Graham’s is that he prefers the solitary experience of watching films at home on DVD to the shared enjoyment of sitting in a crowded cinema. So he is hardly likely to appreciate the requirement of publishers to provide Entertainment for their great mass of readers, to make reading a positive pleasure. They do that with engrossing human interest stories, imaginative features, colourful columnists – items to curl up with. Quick-fixers dashing online hardly go there in search of enjoyment. Pleasure-seekers have always been prepared to pay for their pleasures.

But I believe this third type of consumers will still want their pleasures cover-wrapped, they will want something more tangible than fleeting images on an impersonal screen. While quick to go to the web for free News and quite likely to pay for online Analysis and Comment, they will continue to hand over their money for a printed product they can actually curl up with.

In foreseeing the inevitable triumph of new technology over the old, Paul rather grudgingly concedes that “some” magazines will survive by focusing on the magazine as a physical object – “at least for a while.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. Most magazines will survive and flourish well into and through the digital age.

First, because the web can be their ally and not their rival. Unlike newspapers which recklessly have tended to throw everything for everybody on the web, magazines have much more specific audiences to target, able to ensure their online material is shrewdly designed to complement the printed content, to add the exciting elements of immediacy, interactivity, sound and video.

Secondly, while every website which appears on your screen has to conform to identical dimensions, every print magazine projects a different personality by way of its size, shape, texture, typography and layout. Above all, instead of the instantly disposable nature of a newspaper, a magazine is most often an elegant package to possess and cherish, something whose very purchase from a crowded news-stand makes a public statement of interests and taste.

Paul’s conclusion is that any established medium trying to compete with the new is likely to be the loser. But the invention of the gramophone didn’t stop people going to hear Dame Nellie Melba, movies didn’t kill the theatre, radio didn’t destroy the recording industry, television didn’t spell the end of the cinema. They all learned to adapt and are all still here.

Publishing now has the opportunity to take on many additional new forms but there will always be a demand for words on paper. And I’m prepared to state that in black and white!

Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk

Why magazines are wasting their most powerful weapon

Editor — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:30:22 +0000

Magazine publishers fighting for survival in face of falling sales and declining advertising are wasting their most powerful weapon.

That weapon is the cover and entries have been flooding in from across the industry for The Maggies – the first-ever Magazine Covers of the Year awards. You can see the winning titles on www.themaggies.co.uk and they share a high standard of imaginative design and sales impact.

But what concerned me, as one of the judging panel that selected the short-lists, was the poor standard of the great bulk of the entries. And these were no run-of-the-mill selection – they had been submitted by publishers, editors and art directors in a conscious choice as their very best covers of the year.

So what was wrong? In a word – words. Far, far too many of them.

A cover is essentially a recruitment poster. Not a familiar sight for regular readers who will know where it is on a crowded news-stand. Its job is to jump out of the throng and grab the attention of the passing traffic; to win new readers and win back lapsed readers with the promise that this issue is really special.

Research shows that shoppers visiting a sales point with the general idea of buying a magazine (not picking up a regular purchase) spend between 5 to 7 seconds looking at any one magazine.

Their eye is first caught by the main image on the cover, then a strong coverline linked to that image. Hopefully, the next step is to lift the magazine from the shelf and study supporting coverlines that sell the most exciting features to be found inside. Not everything.

So many magazines have turned their covers into veritable contents pages with the main image struggling to break through heavy curtains of type.

One of Condé Nast’s entries was Glamour magazine (and remember this employs one of the smallest formats on the news-stand). There we had Keira Knightley poking her head out of an assemblage of no less than 78 words of coverlines. The publishers assured us that a celebrity face and a glimpse of one shoulder was enough to give a sales uplift of 5% but since the main coverline proclaimed “YOUR BODY’S SEXIEST CLOTHES” it might have been even more effective to show a little more of what she was wearing.

As it was, the largest piece of her dress on view was submerged between 10 words of a coverline reading: “Stalker nightmare – He hid in my room while I slept.” No wonder Keira looked so serious.

Even so, Glamour was relatively taciturn compared with IPCMedia’s Rugby World (110 words of coverlines); Nat Mags’ She (109); Esquire (100 and 89 for two separate entries); and Good Housekeeping (95); and OK (83). Tilllate clubbing magazine (108) and Small World travel and leisure magazine (98) did their best to compete with the big boys. To be fair, Time magazine carried only four words and Creative Review none.

The idea behind The Maggies was that shortlists in six different categories would be selected by a professional panel but that the winners would be choice of the public (just as they make their pick from what is presented to them on the news-stand).

Significantly all six receiving the most votes carried less coverlines than the average for their sector. That principle was almost breached by Bauer’s Q magazine which the judging panel awarded the title of overall Magazine Cover of the Year. This carried all of 59 words of coverlines but the difference was that the typography was dramatic and the words were positioned so as not to intrude on the striking image of pop star Lily Allen in the company of two black panthers.

There’s a very big difference between coverlines carefully placed to support the image and those merely scattered over the image; between a busy cover and one that is just messy.

In these days 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 message and weaken the overall impact.

A proud chef may be tempted to list every single dish of his a la carte menu on a board outside his door in the hope of attracting passing trade. But if the restaurant doesn’t look attractive you don’t bother to cross the street and read the words.

Another worrying aspect of current cover design is an apparent inability to recognise that the requirement is to produce something which demands attention by being immediately visible among those congested shelves; which is extrovert rather than recessive.

This is where the colour palette is crucial. Research in this area shows that people are most easily drawn to covers using red and blue against a pale background. Yet no less than 40% of the entries were predominantly black and brown. What more certain way of fading into the background?

Media analyst Jim Bilton (www.wessenden.com) points out that while magazines sales are continuing to decline overall (down 10 per cent year on year) subscriptions are showing a slow but steady increase.

If more and more readers are preferring to commit for a whole 12 months to a magazine that arrives sight unseen through the letterbox, it would suggest to me that publishers are not working hard enough to win back readers in those precious 5 to 7 seconds at the news-stands.

Peter Jackson