SEMI-GLOSS by Justine Cullen

Author:Justine Cullen [Cullen, Justine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

COVER SHOOTS AND OTHER CATASTROPHES

THERE’S NOTHING SO magic in the world of magazine publishing as the cover. Even though magazines have lost their place at the top of the media pecking order, covers are still prime real estate—lusted over, aimed for, analysed, liked, posted and reported on. Pretty much everything except purchased. Even as influencers have grown in power, with their follower counts in many cases far greater than the audiences any magazine can claim, many of them still consider a cover the ultimate prize. Turns out that even people with a thriving Instagram Live presence like to be able to give their grans something tangible to show off to the ladies at bingo.

Pulling together a cover should be simple. You have a cover star in mind, you speak to her people, you book a crew and a studio or location, and you take some pictures. But it’s not nearly as easy as all that. First, you have to think of someone you’d like to run, which is sometimes difficult in itself. They have to be a person who is interesting to your readers, ‘on brand’ for your masthead and having a bit of a moment. They can’t have been on your cover in the past year or any of your competitors’ covers for the past six months, and they have to be famous and liked enough to hopefully sell their socks off. As my time as an editor went on, these mythical unicorns were getting harder and harder to find. I missed the days in the late noughts when we could just chuck Mischa Barton on the cover and know everything would be okay. No-one didn’t love Mischa. I don’t know where it all went wrong, for her or us.

Hovering over you like an ominous cheap perfume as you make these decisions is the very real fear of failure—and being fired. An editor’s career can be made or broken on the covers she runs, so there isn’t a lot of room for error. It might be easier if we had more Australian celebrities with the pulling power to sell mags, but there are just not enough Nicoles, Naomis, Cates and Margots to go around, so we most often need to look above our station to international stars for the plum spot. Unfortunately, this means needing to convince a generally scary Hollywood publicist of the value of letting their client spend a day shooting for a little Australian magazine with our little Australian numbers, when that day could be allocated to a magazine in, say, China, and reach about a billion more people. And even if they like you, they still have to decide whether your proposed cover date works for when they have a project to promote, go for your shoot concept, approve the photographer and hair and make-up teams, and, once convinced, find a date said celebrity can be available to shoot between filming or touring or hanging out in Montauk with their new secret boyfriend. Once all

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.