What does it take to be a copywriter?

Can the answer be in a book?

There was a rather interesting question posed on a LinkedIn group:  ”What ‘must-have’ copywriting book do you recommend?”

That seemed to imply that reading a book on copywriting could allow anyone so inclined to become one. Nothing could be more misleading. Of course, if the question was meant to learn how to become a better copywriter, then it’s slightly more possible. But it’s still the same answer: copywriting is a craft, like any other, which will only improve with continual, ceaseless practice and experience.

You really have to want it.

I’ve never known anyone who woke up one day and decided they had to be a copywriter. To want that, you’d have to desperately want to earn your living crafting finite messages in an enormously competitive field. You’d have to want to perfect the use of language, metaphor, euphemism, vernacular – all of it –  so that what you write might not only stop readers, viewers, listeners and visitors, but might also convince them to focus on your message. You’d also simultaneously have to be far subtler than the morning news.

Screaming headlines do not make any of us more interested in marketing messages. To be universally appealing, copy must be clever, enticing and compelling. And if you’re targeting a very specific audience, you also have to be unerringly relevant.

So before you count on a book to guide you into this parallel universe to diamond cutting, you damn well better have some relevant life experience – as a reader and writer – before jumping into these shark-infested waters.

Further, no book on “copywriting” will get you a job. Only your samples will. And you’ve got to have the chops to get there.

Catch 22, again.

With a nod to Joseph Heller, copywriting is one of those professions in which you can’t get a job until you’ve had one. No, that wasn’t a typo. You have to have extraordinarily impressive samples of the craft to even be considered for a job. The wormhole we’ve all found is to create a portfolio of spec samples until we have actual, produced ads to show.

To pass on the very sage advice I was given when I was starting out: “only do samples of things you really love so that that will come through in the writing, and get a young art director to help you so that you both have samples to show.”

I took that advice to heart and created a pre-job campaign for my favorite Indian restaurant. If they ever did much advertising, they certainly would never have done the full-page, four-color ads I created for them.  But they were great ads, in all humility, because they were fun. The first headline in the campaign was “There’s no such thing as curry powder in India.” Which is true, and educational. I had fun doing the sample ads, and people had fun reading them.

It took several months of working on my spec book along with willing art directors to get to the point when I actually landed my first ad agency job, on “Madison Ave.” In advertising, you’re only as good as your last campaign. That’s why everyone’s portfolio is worth its weight in Au (http://bit.ly/lM7nWn). So like many others I knew, I had duplicate portfolios in case one was lost. Why would a portfolio be lost? Because advertising headhunters were forever shuttling them around to various agencies looking for copywriters and art directors.

And that’s another fact of life about advertising: to grow your portfolio, you often have to keep changing jobs. (My first assignments were on Seagram’s 7-Crown and Crown Royal, and Schaefer beer. All booze, all the time. I needed a change after a year of that.)

The book I recommended.

So was there a single book that everyone agreed on? Ha. Every single answer was different. And each showed the author’s background, preferences and proclivities. Nearly all advertising books are either memoirs, which don’t help neophytes get past square one, or self-advertisements, which are equally unhelpful.

That’s why my recommendation was: “Get yourself a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.”

No book can ever guide one into how to write – the most any book can do is describe what it”s like to write. You really have to work and work and work. You have to find your voice, play with tone and style, and ultimately just keep doing it. Inevitably, as you do, questions of grammar and style will come up. The NY Times Manual of Style and Usage is great, along with the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. But for something small, handy and wholly reliable, I most often turn to the The Elements of Style.