There aren’t too many times anymore where I start reading a blog post or webpage about writing or writers and find myself reading something completely new and different.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that I know everything there is to know about writing, or that there is nothing that anyone else can teach me about writing that I don’t already know. It’s just that most of the time, whatever it is that I do learn is related or directly expounding upon something that I already knew about, even if I didn’t actually know the details.
So, today, when I finally got around to reading the Firefox tab that I opened a few days ago entitled, "The 5 Best Copywriting Books: An Unconventional Guide," I expected to see a couple of familiar books and maybe a couple of books that were new, or a book or two about copywriting that I had never come across before. Although, typically, in the latter case, I often am familiar with the author.
Ironically, I don’t really bother with books on writing anymore. The fact of the matter is that most of them are woefully out of date, and even the ones that have been updated usually only pay lip service to the fast changing pace of the writing world. These days, things move pretty fast, and if you are stuck in a query, wait for response, query another editor, wait for response, type of mode, you aren’t going to keep up.
However, there is always plenty of good wisdom about the actual craft of writing that can, and should, be learned from books, both modern and "classic."
What intrigued me about this particular post was its promise of an "unconventional guide." I was not disappointed.
The writer of the article has the view that the only way to really learn copywriting is to jump in with both feet and do copywriting. He has a point. Copywriting is a strange beast, in no small part due to the fact that it morphs from person to person and from company to company depending upon needs and requirements. While the basic tenants are constant, the specifics that make up reality very widely.
Check out the list of best copywriting books which, incidentally, are unconventional because not one of them is actually a book about copywriting.
(I don’t feel like deep linking this post or trying to work any of my "automatic" links into the text, so instead, please use the menus to click around and have fun. I’ll worry about the moronic indexing spiders on another day.)