Magazine Covers

A magazine editors main concern is the cover, which they spend 50% of their time on because the cover attracts consumers and tells us some of the articles featured in the magazine. It is the "face" of the magazine and is a brand image, when someone walks into a shop, they can recognise the magazine's cover easily. The editor of Kerrang! makes sure the cover appeals to whole of its readership by consistently featuring different sub-genres of rock, and this makes sure everyone has something they'd like to read. The main sells are give aways, freebies such as stickers, posters, calenders, featuring well known artists and you can even turn the magazine into a collectors item; for example: collect all five issues with a member of My Chemical Romance on each cover. A cover-mounted CD boosts sales up to 40,000, most being casual readers and the editor must ensure that the magazine features more things; but cheaper to produce such as stickers etc. to keep these new readers. Mixmag offers a CD with every issue and this evidently raises the costs of production and therefore, raises the price of the magazine. This doesn't affect the sales because the CD may be the reason some readers buy the magazine so if they stopped producing the CDs, they may lose a lot of customers. Disadvantages of this are it is quite time consuming and people will expect free CD's with every issue. Two most important areas on a cover are the logo and the "sweetspot"; this is because the logo is for the consumers to recognise and confirms the brand image. The sweetspot attracts the audience because that is where the reader's eyes are drawn to first and they can scan through what will be featured and will want to buy the magazine. Two important things a magazine must try to do is be different everytime because readers will get bored of repetition and also, they must still have the same theme because it is part of the brand image and they should try to keep some things recognisable.