In search of the perfect magazine cover star

Taylor Swift, cover star of April's Vanity Fair , is a 23-year-old superstar with a fringe. Last October, her album Red sold 1.2 million copies in its first week of release. Lately, America's former "sweetheart" has not been boring with her fame. Her biggest hits have been sharp confessionals about her clutch of celebrity boyfriends, and her most recent is an everyday tale of going on the pull for men who are "bad news".

She seems, in other words, like a gift to any magazine editor in search of a starlet who gives “good copy” rather than blandifying her life into one media-trained platitude-fest. But in the US, such signs of humanity are enough for PR “experts” to warn Swift that she should stop dating so many men and stop complaining, as she has done, that it’s sexist of the media to twist her into someone who is “clingy, insane, desperate”. To back up their argument, the tut-tutters cite a chain of identikit online articles suggesting magazines with Swift on their cover sold badly in 2012.

Leaving that claim to one side for a moment, who, in today's magazine market, does shift copies? According to Lucie Cave, editor-in-chief of Heat , there are no guaranteed top-selling cover stars any more – not even "Easy V" herself, Victoria Beckham. Its latest issue features one of the lesser Kardashians side-by-side with the toned stomach of Frankie Essex from The Only Way is Essex , which hardly seems like a solution to the problem.

An early adopter in 2000 of the benefits of putting "non-star stars", aka Big Brother contestants, on its front, Heat 's circulation has plummeted in tandem with waning interest in reality show casts. Other titles have been more blessed with the ascent of natural fits for their covers. Cheerily reverential monarchists Hello! , for example, can choose between royal body Kate Middleton, party-soldier Prince Harry and the resurgently popular Queen Elizabeth.

It hasn't helped. Hello! 's circulation is down 18 per cent year-on-year to less than 306,000, which isn't much better than Heat 's near 20 per cent yearly decline to 262,000. Their misfortunes suggest both titles are being strangled by the gossipy tendrils of MailOnline, with its 111 million unique monthly users and forecast annual revenues of £45 million.

Neither competition from a headline-machine such as MailOnline nor the gradual migration of magazines from print to digital should eradicate the importance of a meticulously-planned cover as the shop-window essence of a publication’s brand. But circulation declines across the consumer magazine sector mean the price for getting it wrong is now a lot higher.

Seemingly getting it right, Xposé magazine, the TV3 tie-in published by Zahra Media Group, has successfully debuted in the Irish market with a circulation of 21,000, which doesn't leave it too far behind established monthlies such as Irish Tatler and Image . To date, its cover stars have all been Hollywood's finest: Mila Kunis, Reese Witherspoon and the two Jessicas (Biel and Chastain).

Back in the UK, Grazia (down 9 per cent year-on-year at 186,493) clearly has a formula that it likes. Its Christmas issues for the past two years' running have been Cheryl Cole covers with pictures of Jennifer Aniston inset and straplines promising "party looks". Grazia now ranks among a select group of fashion-led titles desperately trying to turn posh model Cara Delevingne (20) into the next Kate Moss (39).

A frequently-heard criticism of women's magazines is that their cover stars are uniformly and oppressively young, though there are titles that favour the more mature, from glossy monthly Psychologies , which counts Gillian Anderson (44), Robin Wright (46) and Allison Janney (53) among its recent cover stars, to the mass-market weeklies that chase unvarnished snaps of Loose Women panellists. The far more egregious aspect of covers across the market is their near-total preference for white women.

Despite the naysayers, the currency of the safely Caucasian Taylor Swift is still intact. All US magazine statistics for 2012 prove is that magazines such as February's Vogue , May's Glamour and December's Harper's Bazaar with Swift beaming out beneath their masthead didn't sell as well as those titles' big-fat September issues – the month that always sees the most glossies fly off the shelves.

But if 2013 is set to belong to any cover star, it is surely the girl with the Oscar – the face of the multi-million dollar movie franchise who swears on the red carpet and does shots before press conferences. Swift might be as cool as bubblegum pop stars get, but she's no Jennifer Lawrence.