The faces that smile on sales

When Marie Claire runs its first male cover star in 14 years, and GQ abandons its lissom babes for the same family man, then something must be up in magazineland. David Beckham, after all, is reputedly Britain's coolest man - and as World Cup fever grows, editors are betting their circulations on his power to shift vast numbers of copies. "I'd be very disappointed if Beckham turned out not to be our biggest cover of the year," says Dylan Jones, editor of GQ.

Marie Claire, meanwhile, took the unprecedented step last Sunday of reprinting an extra 60,000 copies even before its June edition hit the newsstands.

But can a cover star really determine how well a magazine sells? According to an Evening Standard survey of last year's hits and misses, the right celebrity at the right moment can boost circulation by up to a third. Nicole Kidman, Geri Halliwell and Kylie Minogue provided the year's top-selling covers for glossies such as GQ and Harper's Bazaar.

Notable failures, meanwhile, included Penelope Cruz and the model Gisele Bundchen, who, between them, led the year's lowest-selling issues of Esquire, New Woman, Tatler and Marie Claire. No wonder that, according to the editors we spoke to, the choice of cover photograph remains an intensely debated matter.

"It's not rocket science, but it's definitely a science," reflects Jones, who spent £30,000 to photograph Beckham for June's GQ. The most successful cover stars, he believes, manage to excite readers while remaining cosily familiar - qualities exemplified by Beckham, boosted next month by the national interest paid to his day job.

"The principles remain the same, it's just the cast list that changes," Jones explains. "David Bowie can have a career for 30 years, Madonna for 20, then it can stop. When was the last time you saw Prince on a cover?"

For GQ, Kylie has proved a reliable bet: her October cover was its best seller of 2001, and an earlier cover featuring her in a minimalist tennis dress achieved its highest sale ever. Madonna also did well for GQ last year. But Jones admits that he cannot always predict the results. "Natalie Imbruglia, in December, was aesthetically one of our best covers last year - elegant and erotic. But it didn't sell fantastically well, to say the least."

Over at Esquire, rival editor Peter Howarth concedes that Beckham will prove "a good editorial decision" for GQ. "But Beckham's pretty much a one-off in their canon of men," he adds. "It's more typical for them to use a girl in as few clothes as they can persuade her to wear. They'll get publicity for this, but, from our experience, publicity doesn't necessarily translate into sales."

Esquire claims to have a "unique" cover policy among its peers: "We just choose what we want, be they male or female, young or old, black-and- white or colour, " Howarth explains. " Fundamentally, we have a loyal readership, so circulation does not vary too much." His bestselling cover last year featured Samuel L Jackson - "a black-and-white photo of a 53-year-old black man smoking a cigarette", as he describes it - but he admits that he, too, cannot always call the winners. "Why would Jude Law (April) outsell Penelope Cruz (May)? That always surprises me. We've had a Gail Porter cover that sold bucketloads, and, another time, we had Donna Air, which didn't sell at all. That's one of the reasons I changed our policy - we were struggling to second-guess the 16-year-olds' tastes."

In the Standard's survey, actresses tended to outperform models - although for Eve, the umbrella given away free with May's issue made up for the unknown face. But some magazines, such as InStyle, refuse even to consider models. "The whole thinking behind InStyle is that the sophisticated woman, of average age 32, responds better to a celebrity - a model doesn't get to choose her own clothes," says Louise Chunn, acting editor, for whom Julia Roberts (last March) and Kate Winslet (September) are ever-reliable crowd-pullers. "There's a lot of recognition with both for the readers - Kate is a much-loved local girl, seen as stylish but human, who goes out in jeans and trainers. Michelle Pfeiffer has also done really well. Some people thought she was not tremendously current, but it's a lovely picture - you think, 'great looking woman', not 'over the hill'." One who failed was Cate Blanchett in December's issue, which Chunn attributes delicately to "it not being her best photo". It was clearly not Blanchett's year: she also featured on the worst-selling cover of W magazine.

Her stock may rise again, as Peter Howarth points out: "A magazine should be a document of its time, and you have to find the right person for the right month." At certain times, a celebrity may suffer from over-exposure. Perhaps that explains why Naomi Campbell proved to be Vogue's best-selling cover star last February, but had fallen to its worst by October.

Other factors are at stake, too. Cover-mounted gifts can boost sales, such as the T-shirt that helped Sophie Dahl become Elle's best seller last July. For some women's magazines, the catwalk calendar also makes a difference. " February is traditionally very poor for the fashion magazines, but in March, with the new collections, almost anything will work," explains Rita Lewis, Marie Claire's publishing director.

Good fortune also plays a part - particularly as cover shoots may be organised seven months in advance. "You need good judgment, a sprinkling of stardust and a bit of luck," Lewis says. "Last year we put Geri on the cover just at the point when she reshaped her body, and everybody was terribly interested in her. We weren't to know that by the time the cover ran she'd have gone down by three dress sizes."