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"Low-key" may not be the trait readers expect from the editor behind Redbook's sensational cover lines. "Get Him So Hot He'll Call 911!" is one of Winslow's favorites. While Winslow, who is now an editor at The Wall Street Journal, takes credit for recognizing Kunes' potential--"She was really smart and really talented," he says, "a terrific reporter"--he adds, laughing, "I don't recall any class in which we discussed cover lines."

Yet cover lines, as anyone in the industry will tell you, are key to sales. Amid the clutter at supermarket checkout racks, cover lines for women's magazines--be they "SEX: What Men Want at 25, 35, 45" or "Energy Cures for I'm-So-Exhausted Days (And Months)"--must touch a need, says Kunes, "a woman's core."

Through surveys and demographic studies and reader response, Kunes has concluded that the typical Redbook reader is a woman in her late 20s to mid-30s, married and juggling work, children, time with her husband and time for herself. The magazine's objective is to help her balance life's demands, providing information about everything from saving $5,000 a year to preventing lead poisoning to savoring sexier sex. Redbook readers like sex and want to keep their marriage "cooking," says Kunes, "but they are tired." From reader's answers to questions posed on Redbook's Web site, she has deduced that the most effective cover lines promise insight into intimacy.

By all accounts, that deduction is correct: Redbook's circulation of 2.4 million is rising, and advertising pages have remained stable, a major feat in an economically unstable year. Jayne Jamison, vice president and publisher of Redbook, credits not only Kunes' instinct for content, but also her visual sense. Kunes has changed the magazine's palate from bold red to softer purples and oranges. She has added younger models as well as husbands and children, emphasizing, Jamison says, "the me and the we." She understands that readers may not have time to read all of the text, so she incorporates plenty of charts and graphics into stories. And, Jamison, adds, "Ellen has made the magazine more fun," creating quizzes for the reader, such as one that is supposed to reveal who knows a husband better, the mother or the wife.

In some ways, Kunes says, she knows what appeals to Redbook readers because she fits the mold--a little older perhaps, more subway than Subaru, but juggling the same set of demands. Her own experience helps her to create stories and cover lines that capture readers and sell magazines. Still, it isn't easy to keep up. "It is," says Ellen Levine, editor of Good Housekeeping, "a constantly changing business."

When Kunes first took the Hearst Corporation's typing test in 1981, the leading women's service magazines, dubbed the Seven Sisters, targeted women at home, ages 25 to 50. Each magazine had its own personality, but content in most, from Ladies Home Journal to Good Housekeeping, involved crafts and food and fiction, with a few how-to articles on making ends meet and a story or two about women challenged by circumstance or disease. But as more women entered the workforce, readers' interests changed, and the magazines began altering the formula from articles about crocheting colorful afghans to articles on the benefits of massage.

Fresh out of UNH and a six-month unpaid internship at Boston Magazine, Kunes started working on magazines for younger women--Mademoiselle, Seventeen and Self--with a brief stint at Family Weekly. Beginning as an editorial assistant, typing carbon copies on electric typewriters, she crept up the editing ladder as she leapt from publication to publication.

She didn't join the Seven Sisters until 1991, when she snagged a job at McCall's as lifestyle editor. She had spent the previous four years freelancing, writing countless articles and two books, Live Well--or Even Better--on Less and a biology textbook, but she knew that if she ever wanted to be a magazine editor, she needed a full-time job.

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