Books for the copywriter

I've always got books about direct response copywriting and marketing around. Two I'm diving into right now.

2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success: The Pros Tell You Their Time-Proven Secrets. By Denny Hatch and Don Jackson.

One day on The Golf Channel, the powers-that-be decided to have the top 5 golf teachers on the show at the same time. Mistake. They have big egos and were all talking at the same time and all have different approaches. I was worried this book would be a big mish-mash of direct response techniques and thus be confusing.

I could not have been more mistaken.

While there are well over five ways to teach golf, all of them proven, there's only one way to get direct response right...follow the same proven techniques. So this book buttresses all of these. The copy chapter beginning on page 72 is especially brilliant...a superb digest of techniques from the best.

The book is also good because it provides a good road map for the parts of the direct response universe I rarely visit...lists...sweepstakes...graphic design...back-end marketing...etc.

I'm enjoying this now and I'll be dipping into it more.

I'm also dipping into Perfect Phrases for Sales and Marketing Copy by Barry Callen. There are some good ideas in this book but I'm not sure I agree with the notion on page 161 that a headline on a sales letter is optional. There's not a lot of pure direct response in this book. One book always open on my desk is Dan Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter. It has the ugliest cover of any book I've seen but it's tough to beat the content...especially the headline templates on pages 42-47.

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I'm rebuilding my site to help me sell more. In the interim, here's my Krop portfolio.

I specialize in the clinical and creative execution of proven direct response copywriting techniques to make the reader pull out their credit card, write a check, hand over hard-earned cash, and happily provide their email address and additional valuable data.