It is actually quite hard to predict which papers will become hits and which become misses. If I look back over my own papers there were a few I knew were going to (minor) hits, but quite a few of the papers I thought would be of interest were ignored while others I thought were pretty minor attracted a lot of interest.

One area I have never understood (apart from editor laziness) is letting the authors write the article title and abstract. So many great papers are overlooked because the authors wrote a boring or misleading title or abstract.