By Dylan Jones
 

While all magazine teams spend inordinate amounts of time working on their products, two things traditionally take more time than anything else: 1) the cover, and 2) cover lines. And while you might think that all you have to do to sell magazines these days is to put the words ABI and TITMUSS in close proximity, unfortunately there's a lot more to it than that (sometimes you have to use the words sexy naked pictures too).

Of course some magazine teams, and some magazine editors, are better at cover lines than others. Mark Ellen at Q was always good (being particularly skilled at making even the most boring pop stars - Dire Straits, Huey Lewis, Big Country etc - seem interesting), as was Mike Soutar, now the editorial director of IPC Media but once the highly successful boss at FHM. His maxim was to only use lines that were funny, sexy or useful - sometimes all in the same sentence.

But every magazine eventually finds its own level, its own way of selling its stories to its readers. And where once you could be forgiven for simply "dressing" a story to suit your readership, newsstand competition is now so fierce that unless you're genuinely moving a story along - like newspapers do every day of the year - then no one is going to pick you up.

Because of this competition, many magazines have begun overselling stories, and thus disappointing their readers, which is even worse than underselling them. Never promise anything you can't deliver, because the reader won't come back again. (There is one American men's magazine that is currently b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t at cover lines, but it always, always oversells the story, so consequently I, for one, have stopped buying it.)

Also, you should never ask a question on the cover, because it always encourages the reader to answer it themselves. Is Nick Cave the coolest man in pop? (No.) Is Will Young the new Elton John? (No, you idiots.) Can Sven survive the summer? (Well yes, he probably can, actually.) A question usually suggests the editors aren't that sure of their story, and discourages readers from taking them seriously - although having said that, it's quite likely I will have forgotten my own advice in a few weeks should a suitably apt cover line present itself.

Magazines rarely put the names of their journalists on the cover any more, perhaps because it feels slightly old-fashioned and pompous. We still do it at GQ, as does the Spectator and a few others. I suppose we do it to show off, but then I think our readers want us to.

Cover lines can't ever be too big, and when looking over a potential cover, I don't think a month has gone by in the past 20 years when I haven't asked an art director to make them bigger. After all, big is good, but bigger is better. You might have the most erudite, smarty-pants cover lines in the business, but if you can't read them when you're walking into Tesco then what's the point of having them? My advice to any fledgling editor who is having trouble with their art director over cover lines is to always request a size that is twice as big as you really want; the art director will make them half as big as you asked for, so you end up with what you want, and he thinks he's won an important battle.

One word that's always overused on covers, and I hold my hand up here and admit I am seriously culpable, is EXCLUSIVE, usually accompanied by an exclamation mark. Or, even worse, WORLD EXCLUSIVE!. Of course anything's an exclusive these days, and the word should only really be used thus: EXCLUSIVE (TO THIS MAGAZINE).

But above all else, cover words need to make sense. You can be arch and cute and clever-clever to a certain extent, but only if you're targeting a particularly rarefied demographic. And most important of all, it helps if they're spelled right. We have all made mistakes with cover words, and indeed with cover choices, although my two favourite mistakes thankfully happened to other people. The first appeared on the cover of Smash Hits back in the early 80s, when button badges were all the rage: right across the front page, under the logo, the following cover lines appeared in 3in high type: "FREE BAGDE!"

The second appeared on giant 6ft-tall poster boards of a blown-up cover at a press breakfast, where the following cover line was visible to all and sundry: "***** ***** - THE ONLY GLOSSY WITH BRIANS."

Absolutely Fabulous.

Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ, which is published by Condé Nast