Whether your magazine is on paper or online, follow these Best Practices.
While every magazine should be unique, its overall quality often comes down to something more than staff and budget. In my content consulting work—including remakes of more than a dozen magazines—I’ve found myself offering a fairly consistent set of tips that get up the client’s content game. Here are a few.
Work on your cover even before your copy comes in.
If you’re planning on photography, sketch it out months before publication. Mock up the display copy as well. It’ll help you define the issue. And while we’re talking covers…
Try to have a dominant color on your cover.
In my work at newsstand magazines, I found that dominant-color covers easily outsell more polychromatic versions. In general, the color white works best, probably because it makes the type stand out. But any dominant color will work.
Do one special issue each year.
Spend at least 20% more on that issue, reducing the budget for the other issues. Readers tend to remember the standout issue, judging that entire magazine by that issue. On the other hand…
If you only publish two issues a year, make each issue a special issue.
Give the feature well a dominant theme, and sell it big on the cover. Don’t be afraid to do an all-type, or dominant-type, cover for one of those issues. If the copy is compelling, readers will see it as special.
Run a photo spread on your first editorial pages.
Include a substantial (50 words or more) caption. Put the table of contents after that spread. Why? Because few readers actually read the TOC. And very, very few read the TOC to see what to read in the issue. Instead, welcome your readers in with a lavish photo. An exception to this rule: If you have more than one spread. Then run the TOC first, to keep readers from wondering what’s the matter with you.
If you run house ads, don’t make them look like the rest of the magazine.
Ads need to look like ads. Otherwise, readers lose trust in a publication.
When in doubt, skip the editor’s note.
An exception: when the note is a story in itself. (For Southwest: The Magazine for Southwest Airlines, I wrote a monthly ed note that acted as a 300-word standalone essay, whose theme had to do with the cover story.) The inside-baseball ed note, telling the reader about all the hard work you did in the issue, is a snoozer. Ed notes generally test poorly. On the other hand…
Play up the boss letter.
I mean the president’s or CEO’s message. No matter how awful it is, readers read it. Just about every reader study shows this. Readers want to know what the bigshot is thinking. If you can, fight to keep it short—ideally, 300 words. Put the rest in packaging. Make the page look great.
Actively solicit feedback.
Replace the letters page with a Voices page, and reach out to individual readers to send you emails and social media posts. Unfortunately, too few of your readers will use the appropriate hashtags for your institution. Remind them to do that in the department itself. Then call, email, and text your contacts to nudge them for contributions.
Put an abstract on your features.
I encourage clients to have a “Takeaways” box in the first spread of features. It makes readers more likely to engage with the story. Just a sentence or a few bullet points will do.
Avoid stories of between 500 and 3,000 words.
Yeah, I know, this sounds insane. But reader behavior studies I’ve worked with consistently show that stories of in-between lengths tend not to get read. Interestingly, ambitious, well-packaged narrative features of 4,000 words or more tend to get extremely high marks from readers. I’ve found that people tend to think they’ve read the features themselves, even when they’ve just read the packaging.
Limit the Q&As.
It’s the laziest, most overdone of all formats. If you have to run interviews, skip the Qs unless the questioner is someone well known or brilliantly witty.
Try to carry class notes, even if you’re not an alumni magazine.
Get people’s names in your magazine, and they’ll become your champions. I actually once pitched an alumni magazine for former employees of Goldman Sachs, paid for by Goldman Sachs. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. Sigh. It would have been brilliant.
Create an editorial board if you don’t have one already.
Besides offering great advice, they’ll become your best political allies. And make sure a few are the writers you most want to pull in. Put them on the masthead.
Don’t trust letters to the editor and reader surveys.
I’ve found they consistently misread editors, because they tend to be written by your most rabidly loyal constituents. Even the hate mail. If you want a more reliable indicator of how you’re doing, call readers at random. At the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, I tried to call a dozen readers every month. The experience was humbling, and educational.