Copywriting for Authors - Preface

IMPROVING YOUR COPYWRITING CRAFT is a vital for authors and all writers. This preface tells a warning story - and why this know-how is vital, even in everyday living. Start here...

NOTE: I’m re-releasing this course-series here to restore this lost material. It introduces copywriting basics from the renown Eugene Schwartz, which few modern guru’s either know or credit. Including this forward, there are 7 lessons. It is also available in my “Copywriting for Authors” book.

A public meeting about Disasters brought this book to life.

This meeting was simply to help people get organized so they could help each other when the worst happened. Saving lives, property, everything of real value. So human life could get going again after Nature got through with its extreme weather.

What the person was talking about had solutions to anyone who was caught in a real emergency situation could use – with only your neighbors and your own two hands to do something about anything.

It's the first 60 minutes where you can save lives around you – your own, your family, any neighbors you can reach.

What makes a “disaster” is any time the local and higher levels of government get too busy to answer everyone's personal emergencies. People need to personally act at those times, and they need to know what to do – before that next disaster happens.

And the worst part of any disaster happens when people don't know what to do. That's when most deaths can be prevented.

The biggest problem at that meeting was their paltry turnout. Something like only around a dozen people attending for a small city of over 11,000 and a surrounding county containing at least as many more. Rural. But rural areas get hit more often than large cities – even though they are seldom covered in the press other than maybe a picture or a few lines of text.

It doesn't mean that the lives saved or lost are any less valuable.

In a disaster, you need at least one person well-trained in emergency procedures to save lives on every city block. That was the core message. One that only the dozen people attending actually heard.

The poor turnout was because this meeting wasn't effectively marketed – the needs and wants, the emotional connection – all missing. Even though this city sat near the U. S. “Tornado Alley” and had weathered two traffic-stopping blizzards and multiple ice-storms in the last 5 years, as well as a couple of bad droughts in summer that strained their water and electricity supplies..

The cheerful-but-boring presentation also tended to keep people from acting rather than inspire them. A Power-point with no emotional heart-tugging. Video's that didn't work – well, not on a screen you could see.

Vital information which actually saved lives had been communicated in such a fashion that only a few were interested in finding out about it or doing anything with it.

And those few were lulled into complacency.

The moral:

Marketing (and copywriting) is a form of communication.

It sits at the point where emotion and logic meet to cause action.

Poor or missing marketing results in inaction.

Marketing and copywriting isn't just another mind-control game to make money for shysters and scammers.

It's your way to help people find services and products which can improve or even save lives. The more profit you make, the more people you can help. Sales income is a measurement of value you've delivered.

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It was finding of an old column by a veteran copywriter, which led me to unearth this book and bring it to you.

That copywriter pointed out that humankind hasn't noticeably changed as to their reactions and motivations – it was the old classics, tested over years and modernly, which still give the core data you need to study.

You have to study successful advertising and marketing to get your own marketing and advertising success. You don't need to invest a lifetime in discovering them for yourself, when other successful marketers have already done that discovery and written them up.

“Breakthrough Advertising” was listed right up there with “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples, “How to Write a Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab, and “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins. It was a very short list.

Because you only need the basics. You can work everything else from that.

In my other studies of current “legendary” copywriters (and self-proclaimed experts) I've found that they are all standing on the shoulders of these giants – and every thing they say has already been said before. The newer books just have modern words, in the way we talk now. Marketing on the Internet still utilize the same precise principles as printed magazines and road-side billboards have since they were the latest craze.

(The worst among those modern “guru's” don't even credit those who've gone before – or put some other special “spin” on rules, laws, and principles these earlier authors found by intensive and lengthy testing. Then marketing becomes even harder to learn...)

But even worse for Schwartz' masterwork, it's only available as an expensive hardback.

This is the reason I brought this guide to you in this form. His breakthroughs need to be available to copywriters everywhere.

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This revised edition is to streamline the original research and organize it for improved flow after over a decade of regular sales and use.

The point is to help others as I've been helped – and continue to pay it all forward.

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Next: What makes any copywriting fall flat - or succeed. It’s in that first line. And you can only write it after careful and inspiring analysis…

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How This Can Help You

This course and book are being evolved here. Each week (with some later revisions) I’ll bring out a lesson from the course. Meanwhile, I’m cobbling together the main text I’m pulling from - and will make it available in beta (see below) while I edit it in the background.

Meanwhile, comment below or email/DM me with any questions you have. Or get this full beta-edition book, soon available below.

And you can always buy me a coffee…

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Now available as beta course with ebook!

Available for limited time as pay-what-you-want…

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Paid subscribers get instant access to this ebook, below: