Tips for a Well-Structured Magazine

By Jim Offel, VP & General Manager, DCP

Imagine you have a dinner reservation at a fine restaurant in New York or San Francisco. You arrive promptly at eight o'clock, looking forward to a meticulously prepared gourmet meal. Your gracious server takes your order. Ten minutes later, your first course arrives. But instead of the appetizer you were expecting, the server brings you … dessert! You smile and recall your favorite maxim, Life is short; eat dessert first, but still, you feel let down.

Our expectations enhance our enjoyment — of a meal, a movie, a magazine. We know that bite-size appetizers come first, followed by main courses, which are satisfying in their fullness and depth. And dessert? Smooth and sweet, it offers a reprieve from the serious business of the entrée. Dessert signals that it is time to relax. Effective magazines conform to similar expectations, offering appetite-whetting starters, something meaty in the middle, and beguiling finishes that leave readers licking their lips in anticipation of their next issue.

Magazines usually consist of three sections. The "front of the book," a group of short pieces that are easily digested, fun and interesting, is designed to pull the reader into the magazine. Most magazine readers start at or near the beginning, so these short items provide multiple points of entry into the magazine and ensure that there is something for everyone. The pieces, in what are often called departments, run anywhere from 50 to 1,000 words.

The "feature well" consists of meatier content, longer articles requiring more effort and interest on the part of the reader. Features range from 1,000 to 1,500 words (celebrity profiles in People, for example) to tomes of 15,000 words or more (essays in the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly). They delve deeper into a topic than a front-of-the-book department and are typically where you'll find the biggest design splash. Finally, we turn to the "back of the book," to refresh the palate. Here content is lighter and less news-driven, and ranges from fun ("A Spy in the House of Work" in Fast Company) to personal musings and reflections on our culture (George Will in Newsweek or Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated).

So how does this structure apply to a single-sponsor or custom magazine? Let's look at a business-to-business example. The front of the book should contain timely content — information about your new products and services, particularly if they're value-added, and industry-specific news of interest to your customer. Lists, charts and graphics will help to make this section more reader-friendly. Appealing to your audience (e.g., customers, prospects, stockholders) is critical. And, of course, an engaging front of the book will lead readers straight into the feature well.

The feature well is an ideal place to present customer profiles that demonstrate — perhaps overtly, perhaps subtly — the success your customers enjoy by associating with your brand. Features are often presented as Q & As or first-person accounts. The middle of the book section is also the place to delve into issues that are important to your industry, and to foment support for new ideas. By providing in-depth content, you will be demonstrating your thought leadership. The custom publishing back of the book follows the traditional magazine's lead. Again, lighter and less news-driven, it's a good place for columns from industry experts, lifestyle tips and a dose of humor.

The preceding model is, of course, a generalization. Successful magazines — custom and traditional — have introduced their own variations on this theme. Still, go back and look at your favorite magazines. Do they follow the structure outlined above? Does the front of the book burst with color and flavor like bruschetta with vine-ripened tomatoes and tapenade? How about the features? Are they the literary equivalent of braised lamb over fava beans? Does the last third of the magazine drip with the sugary sumptuousness of vanilla-ice-cream-topped apple tart? Dessert may be a wonderful thing, but it's even more enjoyable if it comes at the end of a well-planned and successfully structured meal.