Hard and soft sells: magazines trend to different newsstand and sub covers

We see little of this trend in Canada but, given that ideas percolate north, we are probably going to see magazines offering different newsstand and subscription covers.

Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni has a very good roundup of some mainstream U.S. titles that are doing sometimes radically different things for people who buy single copies and for subscribers. And he's not very impressed.

I firmly believe in the art of the four me me’s when it comes to covers: See Me (the impact of the visual to stop you), Pick Me (the cover lines that I refer to as sell lines), Flip Me (the act of flipping through the pages of the magazines based on a single sell line to validate the rest of the magazine), and the Buy Me or Drop Me (making that final decision to buy or not to buy the magazine). In short, I do not believe that the single copy cover should be any different than that of the subscriber, if we are in the business of customers who count and not just counting customers. Subscribers do visit the newsstands and what they see their should match what is on their coffee table. In my book, a cover should always be designed for the first time user… all others need to see what’s new inside this specific issue: both on the newsstands and in your mailbox.