The cover design for the Australian House & Garden Bathroom Book is a missed opportunity. If you put the title into the type of filtering in most newsagencies you miss that it is the Bathroom Book.
We are lucky in that we can place the title at the front of our bathroom section and show the full cover. Many newsagents would not have this opportunity. Some probably didn’t even notice the specialist nature of this title … I wouldn’t blame them.
If sales do not meet expectations it could be due to this oversight.
While I am no design expert, there must be a way to show the bathroom connection in the top third of the cover.
Publishers need to get this stuff right if they maximise sales opportunities. It seems to me that some simple traditional newsagency like magazine fixturing in the design studio could help deliver better covers.