Magazine editors and designers spend weeks -- sometimes months -- conceiving and executing their covers. And thousands of dollars. At Runner's World, for instance, our photo editor is on a plane each month to oversee the shoot of our cover. Often she spends two to three days on location -- in LA, or Portland, or NYC, or Miami -- making sure every detail, from the lighting to the backdrop to the shoelaces on the shoes the model is wearing, is perfect (or as close to perfect as possible). Then, once she is back in the office, she must go through hundreds of shots in search of the one that will go on the cover of the magazine.
And then she has to wait to see if her work -- her effort and time and precision to detail -- pays off.
That pay-off comes when we get the sales reports from Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart and other big retail chains. We get weekly reports for each of the four weeks the magazine is on the newsstand. We can tell pretty quickly if we have a winner or a clunker. And you want winners because, obviously, sales drives revenues which drives profits.
Losers, well, drive everyone nuts.
And the line between a winning cover and a losing cover can be the 5 or 6 seconds someone like you -- the consumer -- has to glance over a row of magazines at a newsstand. Magazine editors and designers spend hours and tons of money on their covers. You spend seconds.
It can be maddening.
But as intense as it may be, it's what drives the creative energy at pubs: To come up with the cover that will draw a reader to the magazine, and entice him or her to spend 4 or 5 or 7 dollars on it.
It's kind of cool.
For a look the stories behind some of the most successful covers of recent years, check out this link.
http://www.magazine.org/asme/about_asme/asme_press_releases/2010-best-cover-winner.aspx
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