Words and writing Archives - Page 11 of 18

Publishing my ebook on FastPencil

Longtime readers may recall that I started my career as a writer, but not a seller, of screenplays. A special frustration of this status is that a screenplay is not a freestanding creative work. It’s not “done” until somebody makes it into a movie.

It used to be the same with the vast majority of book manuscripts which were lovingly and carefully written and then launched into an unappreciative world. If a publisher turned you down you could print it yourself at a vanity press but the distribution list was limited to friends and relations.

The phenomenon of epublishing has changed this scenario in a major way. Now anyone writing a book can indeed expect that it will be published and distributed if you’re willing to pay the modest sum to register it on Kindle, Nook and similar channels. The market may or may not love you, but you can now say to anyone who crosses your path, “I’ve got a book!”

I have now built out and edited much of the content in the “Copywriting 101” category to create an ebook called “Copywriting that Gets Results”. Initially I planned to use Amazon’s Kindle platform but after reading some reviews I chose to go with FastPencil.com. They made it especially easy for me to import blog posts as a working manuscript and they offer a choice where I can publish on their site for $9.99, or get wide distribution (a number of ebook sites, including Kindle, Nook and others) as well as the setup for a physical book (to be printed on a per-copy basis as required) for an all-inclusive fee of $199.

I chose the latter, and the finished product is now available on FastPencil and will propagate to other epublishing sites over the next few weeks. I was originally going to sell it for $9.99 and then offer a $3 discount to Otisregrets readers, but FastPencil doesn’t allow couponing. So I am publishing the ebook at $6.99 and offering a preview for free; you can also order a hard copy for $14.95 plus shipping.

FastPencil is by no means perfect. Their free publishing format has limited flexibility because they would like you to pay extra for “Silver” or “Gold” level services which come with more design choices and some consultation. And there were some technical glitches along the way which were quickly handled by their support team. But I was determined to make the free tool work in the same way I was determined to make the Copyblogger WordPress style work when I stared my blog. Free is good.

So, I’ve got a book! Now go forth and buy the ebook or printed copy and while you’re at it, sign up for a free FastPencil membership which allows you to do your own publishing. (That’s an affiliate link so by using it you are helping to support this blog. )

Thinking outside the “Johnson Box”

The Johnson box is named for Frank Johnson, who popularized it as a promotional writer for Time-Life books in the 1950s. In an era where most direct mail letters had the appearance of being typewritten, it would be above the salutation, usually centered, and surrounded by a row of asterisks at top and bottom and a line of asterisks down each side—in other words, a box.

Johnson box and intro of sub letter for Great American Recipes

The Johnson box has its equivalent in almost every HTML email today which, in addition to body text, usually has a graphic at the top and some kind of sidebar which is visible in the preview window. In print, it’s morphed into the “superscript”—a statement above the salutation in an attention-getting font that might be next to the address in a personalized letter, or even in the middle of the page with copy wrapped around it. The purpose in every case is to give the reader multiple entry points to increase the odds they will engage with the message.

The classic use of the Johnson box is to summarize the content of the letter—including the key marketing message, the offer and the call to action—in a paragraph. That way a busy reader needs read no further.

But I like to use Johnson boxes as a counterpoint—since your letter has two openings, they can be as different as you want them to be and the reader can decide which to read first. A good example is a letter in a package I did with Carol Worthington Levy for Great American Recipes, a continuity program that starts by sending a “gift” of several sample cards and a box to put them in. The Johnson box is all about the offer… but then I am able to squander the first three paragraphs of the letter without even mentioning the product. This was very useful because what we were really selling was the nostalgic experience of using the recipes. The package became Great American Recipes’ first non-sweepstakes control.

These days letters tend to have multiple calls to action (a URL and a phone number, plus maybe fax and mail-back instructions) which can swamp a Johnson box. So I’ll concentrate on one key element of the offer and then provide an abbreviated CTA. My control letter for Online Trading Academy does this. We tell readers they’re going to “learn the secrets of professional traders” and that this an exclusive, invitation-only event, and we’re done.

Herschell Gordon Lewis in one of his books provides an example of another use of the Johnson box: to incite curiosity. A subscription offer for Cat Fancy magazine starts with a quiz about cats. If the purpose of the letter is to engage the reader in a dialog, why not start at the top? A similar application is any letter or email that’s going to offer a series of numbered “rules” or “questions”. Pull out one example (always from the middle, never item #1) and use that to tease the reader into wondering what other secrets you have for them. E.g. “Rule #6: never drink water on an airplane unless you see the can it was poured from.”

You can tell I’m a big fan of superscripts/Johnson boxes, but they aren’t appropriate for every letter. Don’t use them for a very short letter which is meant to be consumed as one gulp. And since these devices immediately brand your message as advertising, they aren’t appropriate if you want to make the letter look very personal or formal. (Although there are exceptions, as always: the Online Trading Academy letter is supposed to be very exclusive, but it gets away with its superscript by using the fancy typeface of an engraved invitation.)

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

How to write a white paper

White papers, properly executed, are the gold standard for a specific type of marketing in which you convince prospects that they should do business with you because you know so much. Professional white paper writers abound in Silicon Valley and other tech-heavy territories and they typically charge $10,000 and up to write a document that ends up as 10 or more dense 8 ½ x 11 inch pages. But the rest of us may be called upon to write a white paper as part of a larger assignment for a client, and today’s tips are for the writer in that scenario. These tips are also for you if you are a marketer who would like to produce a white paper internally.

1. A white paper is not a selling document. If your insights are really just a bunch of sales points, that’s not a white paper and positioning them as such will do you more harm than good. Save the product benefits for the product brochures. Your white paper should describe a problem that people in your prospect’s situation might face, or a new business or technological development they need to know about, that just happens to be relevant to your product. It’s ok to put a tie-in summary section at the end but not really necessary; your reader will connect the dots.

A good example is a white paper I wrote for EMC called “When Content Matters”. Content is structured information inside a database, which is managed by EMC’s Documentum product. Microsoft had just come out with a light version of content management in its latest version of Office, and our job was to convince the reader that their content was so important it should never be trusted to such a “basic” solution. Documentum was hardly mentioned until the end. Instead, the paper built a case for the complexity and diversity of content so that the reader became concerned and disoriented and was yearning for an escape from Microsoft—which we eventually provided.

2. A white paper is not an academic document. Some of my readers may be old enough to remember “white papers” that used to be trotted out by American presidents and politicians to support a war or other untenable proposition. They were supposed to be authoritative because they appeared scholarly, and the same goes for marketing-driven white papers today. But never forget that you are actually selling something, behind the scenes. In fact, some of the most effective papers I’ve seen are documents that take actual research (complete with the footnotes and raw interviews or statistics) and summarize it in a way that is understandable to a lay reader; along the way, you can politely steer them into the appropriate point of view.

3. A white paper is written for a specific audience. Academic studies often begin with the desire of the researcher to solve a specific problem which can be of very narrow interest. You, the marketer, need to begin with the audience and figure out what is important to them. Often the same information can be presented in different ways to different audiences. For example, I did two papers to educate physicians about electronic health records (EHR). One was sponsored by a peer association and focused on how EHR was going to help them practice better medicine. The other was for a medical billing company and focused on how EHR was going to increase profitability and help them get paid faster by Medicare.

4. A white paper should capitalize on the expert knowledge within your client’s organization. Every company is full of subject matter experts, and this is your/their opportunity to turn that knowledge base into something fungible. Product managers, for example, spend their lives explaining technical features in a non-technical way. Sales managers understand the pain points that move prospects to a buying decision. Customer service people know the problems that cause the most headaches in the daily lives of your customers. Interview a few of these subject matter experts and the white paper may start to write itself.

5. You can create a sort of “poor man’s white paper” by mining existing resources. These might include third party analysis or reprints which you have permission to use, combined with a few sales documents which are meaty instead of full of fluff. You might even consider including a product quick-start guide if it’s well written. The combination of resources becomes your “fact kit” or “info kit” which, appropriately presented, can become much more than the sum of its parts.

And if you don’t have the budget to pay for reprints, an alternative is to put the info kit on a web page (the fulfillment page after the prospect has registered on a landing page) with brief descriptions and links to the source documents. Presto, now you’ve created a white paper without actually writing for one and without paying anybody. Wait, don’t do that. Hire a starving copywriter instead.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

A big fat lie

I’ve previously written on the topic of lying with statistics, an easy though dishonest way to manipulate your marketing message because consumers assume if it has lots of specific numbers attached to it, it must be true.

This week we had a great example of statistical manipulation in the new report “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011” which was jointly issued by the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the noble-sounding Trust for America’s Health. Here’s the meat of it:

“Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. “

My god, that’s shocking. No wonder newspapers and TV reporters coast to coast have picked it up more or less verbatim. But stop and think about it.

Suppose we went from zero obese states (which we’ll define as a state with an obesity rate over 20%) to 10 or 15 in that twenty-year period. That would be front page news. But this report said we went from zero to 49 states. From not a single state having a high obesity rate, to every state except one in this category.

Or, let’s look at super-obesity states (which we’ll define as a state with an obesity rate over 25%). Twenty years ago that definition would not have even registered, since every state but one was under 15%. Now two out of three states are in the mega-colossal, super-obese category.

Sure there are a bunch of fatties around. But don’t these statements seem simply incredible on the face of it? Could it be that in those 20 years…..

…. Somebody had changed the definition of obesity?

And in fact, yes, that’s exactly what happened. In 1998 the National Institutes of Health introduced the Body Mass Index and 25 million Americans went from fit to fat overnight. They didn’t binge on salty snacks from dusk till dawn; their condition was simply the consequence of a change in the way overweight was defined.

I’m not saying obesity is not a problem. Of course it is. But look how easily the statistics can be manipulated and how hungrily the mass media will gobble them up.

Does your copy have a “voice”? Should it?

One of my favorite direct mail letters of all time came from someone called the “Scripps Center for Executive Health”. The first few paragraphs go like this:

Dear Mr. Maxwell:

In the next 30 seconds, someone will die of a heart attack. In the next 53 seconds, someone will have a stroke. In the next 60 seconds, someone will die of cancer. All in the U.S.A. And have I mentioned that about one-third of all deaths from cardiovascular disease occur prematurely, before age 75.

Hello, Mr. Maxwell… I’m still trying to get your attention.

Let’s face it. We men tend to resist health advice rather stubbornly. If you agree, remember that the difference between my male stubbornness and yours is what I’ve seen as a physician. So if you think you don’t need what I’ve been writing you about, here’s one more wakeup call:

You need a wholeperson picture of your health.

This letter is wrong on so many levels, but most of all it’s the voice. The writer starts by throwing cold water in the reader’s face although he can’t resist being a wise guy with the “have I mentioned”. After shouting at me in the indented subhead, he puts his arm around my shoulder but I am going to push it away because I don’t feel like being friendly with this person who was so recently pummeling me. Too late, he reveals something that I would have no way of knowing—he’s a doctor. Then he morphs into a new age healer with the deadly invented word “wholeperson”. At this point I threw the letter in the trash—though fortunately I retrieved it so I could share it with you.

A letter is always “from” someone and if you don’t keep your voice consistent you will give your audience one more excuse to head for the exits while your play is still in its first act. The most common error (you see this in television infomercials, too) is to build rapport with a personal and emotional tone, then break the spell with a hard sell call to action. Or, to speak to the reader in a human, personal way and suddenly switch to jargon or legalese.

On the other hand, you can help your cause by adopting an appropriate persona such as the subject matter expert, the fellow enthusiast, or the kindly mentor (this is the character that often sells product to a senior audience, and it may be what my wholeperson writer had in mind before the letter went off the tracks.)

Other media can have a voice too, even if it’s a catalog or informational website. The writer is the friendly, approachable tour guide, anticipating the reader’s needs and questions. And an occasional aside can make it more interesting: I once did a catalog of repetitive sports fan merchandise (the same bobblehead or jersey, repeated with a description for every team you could imagine) and it helped keep the interest of the reader to invent a copywriter who was the owner’s assistant, making his own comments on the items.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

The end of “edgy”

One of the side benefits of tough economic times is that fewer clients are asking for “edgy” work. Edgy we’ll define as “different for the sake of different” but it is also has an element of cool. It’s a special request of marketing managers who want to be able to show around their work and get the compliment, “ooh, that’s edgy!”

So what’s the problem with edgy? Good creative grows from a solid understanding of product and audience and a calculated plan to put the two together, which may or may not produce something never seen before. If you’re selling an insurance product it’s not likely that it will meet the edgy test without being irrelevant and ridiculous. But maybe you could sell a new movie in an edgy way… or maybe not.

In the great article on Pixar in the May 16 issue of the New Yorker, John Lassiter remembers the first time he pitched the movie “Toy Story” to executives at Disney. “They said, first, ‘You absolutely can’t have “Toy” in the title, because no teenager or young adult will come see the movie.’ And second, we had to make the characters ‘edgy.’” Can you imagine Woody as a bleary has-been with a Nixonian 5 o’clock shadow? That’s Disney’s “edgy” version which was ultimately tanked in favor of the thoroughly traditional cowboy who is now part of movie iconography.

Anthony Lane, the writer of the Pixar article, advises dramatists to “avoid anyone who talks about edgy, apart from a practicing mountaineer.” Same goes for those mini-dramas we call advertising. Most creative briefs have a section about the voice of the copy, and it’s fine to request a fresh and unexpected tone and the copywriter will do their best as long as it doesn’t compromise the core marketing message. But please, no “edgy”.

How I became a copywriter

I would guess that relatively few people spring from the womb and say, “I’m going to be an ad copywriter when I grow up”. More likely you have an aptitude for writing and you discover copywriting as a way to make a living, or else you are asked to write copy as part of another job and discover you’re good at it.

I came from the first group. I went to film school to become a rich and famous screenwriter, but I turned to freelance copywriting as a way to support myself until I got my big break. I actually did apply for the proverbial “job in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson” but I didn’t get it; my first assignments were writing sale catalogs for department stores. I liked the challenge of finding a way to say something meaningful about a product in a paragraph or two, but it never occurred to me that I was actually selling something.

After a few years of this, I went into one of my department store clients, The Broadway, to see if there were any copywriting assignments coming up. There weren’t but the direct mail advertising manager had just quit and so I was offered that job. For the first time I became accountable for my results—defined not as whether the designs were pleasing and the writing clever, but how much we sold on a per inch basis. It was a revelation, brought home to me when Jan Wetzel, the VP of marketing at our company, took me around to various stores in the chain on the first day of the sale and we watched customers waiting in line to pay for the very same products we had featured in our catalog.

I had a couple of other “suit” jobs, including one where I was the ad director of a company that sold tools by mail. The orders came in by phone so I could see when we had a hit because the switchboard would overflow to the receptionist and she’d be too busy to say hello. I found myself excited about coming into the office on the first day after a new mailing hit, to see if this would happen. Again, a link between copywriting and results. Amazing.

I could only take the suit for so long and eventually I went back to freelancing and buried it in my back yard. (I assume it’s still there, at the intersection of Occidental and Westerly Terrace in Los Angeles’ Silverlake district.) But I had learned the life lesson that successful copywriting is not about gratifying yourself and maybe winning an award or two with a clever concept or turn of a phrase. It’s all about making something happen—and the more significant your impact, the more a knowledgeable client is likely to pay you for your work. It’s copywriting that gets results.

How to present your creative work

Once upon a time, copywriters and creative directors would present their work in person. I know that concept sounds quaint, but it provided an element of control and stage management which is impossible when you simply click “send” in your Outlook. Here’s how to get it back.

1. Insist on a live meeting to “discuss” your work when it is ready for client review. Nowadays this will be via conference call, very occasionally with a visual hookup. Send over the files beforehand—to avoid technical problems from slow downloads and spam filters—but ask reviewers not to open them till the meeting.

2. In your live meeting, start by recapping the creative assignment. Often you will simply repeat elements of the creative brief which is fine because nobody but you has looked at it in some time. This sets the stage and lets people know they are about to see a product they have already “approved” because it is what they asked for.

3. Tell them what they’re going to see. Rough heads? Concept copy? Thumbnails? You can go as deep or as shallow as you like but the key thing is that everybody needs to understand what they are looking at, and what is not yet available because you haven’t created it.

4. Present the work. Presumably you have at least 3 concepts. NEVER lead with your best concept because some folks are still getting up to speed or are distracted. If one of the concepts is considerably worse than the others (maybe because it’s what the client asked for) don’t lead with that either. So inevitably the first concept is the middle-of-the-road option. After that I would gauge the reaction. If they’re really with you present your best idea next. If they are still getting up to speed present your worst now so it can be rejected. This sounds like a complicated formula but when you’re in the moment it is almost automatic.

5. Ask for feedback–but keep it brief and controlled. Get a couple of comments—it doesn’t really matter if they are minor or major—and answer them in such a level of detail that the client believes you really have thought through every possibility (you have, right?) and to keep on drilling you will keep everybody here all night.

6. Close out the meeting by describing a process by which reviewers will now go off and consider the material according to the schedule and the creative brief. If you’ve properly laid the groundwork, nobody will feel like they are entitled to come up with big objections or wild what-ifs at this point. They had plenty of chance to respond at the meeting, and to raise objections after the fact makes them look bad in front of their peers. (Of course, sometimes the “main” client doesn’t show up for the meeting and plans to answer after the fact; if this is the case with your meeting you have the choice of rescheduling the meeting [and probably getting a second no-show] or keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best.)

7. Go in the bathroom and throw up. Just kidding! But one of my early agency employers actually did this after every client review. I think he was insecure as to whether the work truly was any good and presented on adrenalin (and probably other mood enhancers) which ultimately did him in. If you do a good job to begin with, and know your stuff, you will experience a sense of accomplishment, not nausea.

8 secrets I wish I had known before I started freelancing

(Actually I did know some of these because I had spent time as an advertising “suit”, which required me to apologize way too often for tardy or sloppy creative.)

1. Be on time. Advertising is a business. If you are late on a deadline, it impacts other people throughout your client’s marketing operation and may cost a lot of money. Don’t do it. Exception: sometimes being late is unavoidable. Maybe you have a personal emergency, or maybe the project turns out more complicated than you expected. Talk to the client as early as possible and see if you can get an extension. Make this the very rare exception rather than the rule.

2. Follow the brief or other instructions unless you have raised a question at the startup meeting and gotten very clear approval to go in a different direction. The creative brief, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is a contract between you and the account team. Violate it at your peril.

3. Cultivate a reputation for reliability. Do what you say you will do. Show up at meetings on time, be organized, don’t keep calling the client because you forgot to ask about something you need for your research.

TIP: if you achieve the above three things you will stand out in the client’s mind as a better choice than 95% of other creative practitioners, including people who are more talented than you but can’t escape the label of “flaky creatives”.

4. Understand how freelancers get paid. Be aware that some clients pay so fast it takes your breath away (these will become your favorites… why can’t others learn how big a difference it makes?) and others will intentionally pay you late as part of their cash management. Over time you will develop an instinct for which is which. If somebody is deliberately slow-pay your options are building in extra fees to compensate for the aggravation, finding another client, or simply living with it.

5. Remember you’re a copywriter, not a lawyer or accountant or collection agency. Don’t insist on elaborate contracts, penalties for late payment and similar practices of big companies because you can’t afford to hire real professionals to enforce these practices without raising your rates, plus your clients will just get irritated and go elsewhere. The best way to insure you won’t get screwed, or sued, is to deliver quality work that makes people value you as a business partner.

6. Bill as soon as you can, and certainly as soon as the project is done. Clients tend to pay faster when the project still has a warm glow in their hearts. Plus if a client is going to stiff you or slow-pay, the sooner you know about it the better. Note: In over 20 years of freelance I have encountered only a couple of real crooks. If you choose quality clients and deliver quality work, I predict your experience will be similar.

7. Be sensitive to potential competitive conflicts. Never work for two direct competitors at the same time because it’s a clear conflict of interest; you are trying to take business away from yourself. Never, ever go directly to an agency client’s customers asking for work, even if those customers approach you to do so. The agency will be enraged, may sue you, and at best your reputation for loyalty and integrity will suffer.

8. Never ever lie. Not about your experience, not about your research, and especially not about the originality of your work. Marketing is a surprisingly small world, and getting more so with the network effect of the internet. I once had a freelancer present to me a package I had written as part of his own portfolio. Needless to say, he did not get work from me.

We’re in the middle of a series of posts in which I cover the business aspects of copywriting as I teach them in my class for the Direct Marketing Association.

How to make a living as a copywriter

In the early days of the class I teach for the DMA, many students had their tuition paid by their employers. More recently, most are paying their own way and are specifically interested in how they can make a living as a copywriter. I describe three pathways with which I have some personal experience:

Work for an agency. This is the glamorous choice, especially when you’re looking in from the outside. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a team working on an edgy campaign that turns a new product into a household name with the help of a massive creative budget? Problem is, you have to be pretty senior and pretty well connected to have a meaningful role in the big work. If you’re new to the business you can expect to start at the bottom, work as a proofreader or copy editor first, put in long hours and not make very much money until you prove yourself.

But there are lots of personal perks to working with a major agency, which I’ve done at various times both as a contract worker and in my occasional forays into a salaried position. A good agency truly is the big time in terms of complexity and challenge of projects, and creative is genuinely respected—as opposed to just getting the job done or making the client happy. If you’re lucky you’ll learn from the best pros and if you’re good you can go far. Don’t expect job security, though…. your position is only as safe as the account roster.

Work inhouse on the client side. Many companies have a marketing communications department inhouse which is responsible for turning out marketing materials and possibly working as the liaison to an outside agency, and many big companies will have a copywriter on staff. One benefit of working inhouse is that you get to know your product or service deeply, in a way that an outside agency never could. And you may work with many different types of media—print, collateral, broadcast, digital as well as less exciting internal communications.

The drawback is the same as the benefit: you’ll be pigeonholed into your product category and it may be difficult to escape that if you want to go elsewhere. And, you may get bored eventually. But if you’re looking for job security an inhouse job is probably your best choice.

Be a freelancer. This is the only work I personally am suited for, since I get bored working on the same product for long periods of time without a break and I don’t seem to be good at being an employee. Fortunately, I’ve been able to make a living as a freelancer.

Getting started as a freelancer will almost certainly entail some financial sacrifice compared to working for agencies or inhouse, since it takes a while to build up client relationships. On the other hand, if you don’t get a great job offer right away (and you probably won’t) you may have no choice. And you may be able to get tryouts, either as a vacation fill-in or to handle overloads, while you are waiting for that perfect full time job to materialize.

Because you are a business owner as well as a creative practitioner, the financial considerations for being freelance are unforgiving. You have to be a self-starter and you have to be able to make yourself sit at the keyboard when it is beautiful outside and everybody else is going to the beach or the mountains. You also have to be able to handle cash flow irregularities, and keep left and right brains separate so you don’t get mad at a client that owes you money and compromise the quality of your work.

If you can put up with all that, the benefit of being a freelancer is that you have more variety in your assignments and to a degree you can pick what you work on and whom you work with. You can set your own schedule which doesn’t mean you avoid long hours but does allow you to choose when those hours are spent. And, once you build up a stable of clients who like you, the financial security is not bad. A recession causes all companies to cut marketing budgets and you’ll be the first to hear about it, but hopefully you are disciplined to put aside a good chunk of your proceeds for this inevitable rainy day.