The weirdo of copywriting books

If you read The Adweek Copywriting Handbook…

You might caught onto this treat while doing it:

As far as I know, it’s not like any other spanky copywriting book.

There aren’t a lot of precious words wasted on benefits, problems, desires, headline formulas, and all this guru bullcrap 99% of copywriting books are filled with.

I’m not hating on these things.

They certainly work, and they work well.

I’m just saying that this book is a bit different.

It speaks very little of these mainstream(should I say guru?) ideas and rather shares principles, or more like a whole philosophy to copy.

The recurring character between the lines?

Holding your reader's attention as hostage.

That’s the most important thing your copy needs to do. And Sugarman explains it in utmost detail how he is doing it.

Again, saying that benefits don’t work would be stupid.

Sugarman uses them too, it’s not about that. It’s about something totally different.

Let me explain:

Imagine you sit down to write copy.

You get ready, get some tea or coffee, and make yourself comfortable in your chair. Maybe even warm up your fingers and with the research sheets in front of you, start writing.

Or well… would start writing?

But you get stuck.

You want to write and you ‘know’ what you need to write to get some blockbuster copy, but still, something is missing. Like you don’t actually know what you should write, or how you should write it…

You start doubting yourself and it ends up in an endless hellish cycle of writing, deleting, and doubting yourself.

Did this ever happen to you? It certainly did for me.

Many call this writer's block.

I think it’s just a result of consuming too much information and not knowing what to do when the time comes to apply it. But that’s a topic for another day…

Joe gives you a framework for this stuff.

A roadmap you can follow throughout your copy so you never get lost and confuse yourself with what you ‘should’ write.

It gives you something you can hold onto.

Of course, there’s other phenomenal information in that book too.

But this was the most valuable thing I got from that book.

It gave me a way to go.

And reduced my choices.

Because after all, that’s what we all suffer from, too many damn choices.