Like most geeky kids growing up, I played in a lot of punk bands. Plucking away at my bass guitar with good friends and blasting out an almighty racket was a great way to express my creativity. As we got a bit older and discovered jazz and more complicated composition than the three-chord punk of […]
We find ourselves in bed with George Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy. It’s late, but as ever, George sits up with his back on the headboard, manuscript on his lap, reading aloud to his young wife. “I love that line and the story’s really coming on, Eric, but you should make them all animals,” says Eileen. “A fat […]
Karl Marx money pot. Receipts. Trio biscuit bar. Bust of Marcus Aurelias. Fluffy mic. Small painting of Apollinaire. Dog biscuits. Ceramic ghost. Rickenbacker bass guitar. Glass of peach squash (yes, peach). Pen. Hello… Don’t worry, I’ve not gone mad. No madder than usual, anyway. It’s just I’m just sat in my office and those are […]
Before we get into today’s email… You’ve no doubt opened an email that starts with a line like this before. But by that point, you’re technically in the email already, aren’t you? So that’s nonsense. It’s too late to say Before we get into today’s email. But people do this in email marketing all the time […]
You’ve got your idea… You’ve been floating it around your head to make sure it plays… And you’ve been figuring out how you’re going to express it in your copy. Now you need to sit down and start writing. Before you do… Here’s my advice: Take a run-up. Huh? I mean, literally. Open the word document, […]
There are roughly 30 trillion words on the Internet… This is worked out at roughly 300 words a page spread across approximately 100 billion pages. It’s a tough calculation. Even tougher would be to work out how many of those words are either ‘solution’ or ‘passion’. I imagine it’s far higher than either of us […]
Here’s the plan… I’m going to hit you with five fast chunks of concise copy thought. Ready? Some Ideas Suck Some of your ideas will suck. And that’s OK. No one hits gold every time. To get the good ideas out of your head you need to let the bad ones out […]
He looked at me gone out. Really? You read everything aloud? Even the 10,000-word letters? I was being interviewed for a podcast and we’d got on to my editing process. Yep, I answered. Pretty much. Between you and me, dear reader, sometimes I’m in a rush and won’t get a chance. But I would say nine times […]
This will upset some copywriters. But it will cause other copywriters joy. You see this is a piece about how to write more engagingly. But it’s not entitled 15 Tips For Writing More Engagingly. I dislike those pieces. I dislike them immensely. I see them all over the Internet. On Twitter, on LinkedIn, littering my inbox. 10 Rules […]
It’s 1938… Very bad things are going down in Europe. Anti-Semitism is rife. The Nazi’s are about to annex Austria. And for a little known university graduate, there’s no choice… He needs to get out of the country. Fast. He flees to America. He’s lucky. He gets a graduate place at Columbia University, where he […]