Writing to persuade readers to act is not pure logic. Sometimes this raises suspicions. What are those manipulative writers up to? Why not just make the case and be done without all that emotional rhetoric and red type? (I’m just being hypothetical without implying anything good or bad about red type.)

So here is a true story. I know a man who had a job interview involving a weekend trip to meet his potential supervisor and get acquainted with the workplace. He had a great time and, after he returned, he quickly sent a thank you note to the boss. The boss responded to him that he seemed like a great candidate and had performed well in the interview. Nevertheless, since the candidate had signed the note, he took it upon himself to do some lay handwriting analysis. And he decided on that basis that the candidate was completely unfit for the job.

This is an extreme example, but it is an example of something that happens all the time.

I suppose in some sort of strange society where everyone was trained to only respect strict syllogisms, sales writing might be able to restrict itself to a logical argument with nothing else. But in the actual world, you can’t escape the presence of factors that our outside of logic. The “irrational” is always there to subvert your logic and bypass your arguments.

No writer can afford to ignore this fact–not when he or she is writing for human readers.

www.markhorne.com

www.scrollquill.com

If you read the literature in books or on the net, you know that people claim there are all sorts of tricks to sales writing.

But a recent visit to Branson, MO on the part of some friends of mine reminded me that it depends on how you define “trick.”

When you are a writer, you have great limitations. You can’t keep people in your presence for three hours, when you promised they would only have to listen to a two-hour presentation. You can’t watch a couple and find the weaker “link” in the chain of resistance and work on that person. You can’t develop strategies of deception so that, when a couple seems resistant to your initial offers, your partner suddenly comes into the room claiming that some new properties have unexpectedly opened up and, even though it is their normal practice to only offer these to members, they’ve decided to give the prospects an opportunity to buy in.

Writers don’t have tricks–not like those possessed by salesmen with a captive audience in a resort sales presentation. They share techniques in order to be as persuasive as possible. But they have nothing compared to salesmen with real tricks.

Writers never have a captive audience. Even the guy writing copy for the placard over the urinal knows that anyone using it can simply space out and not read the words in front of him. He can’t force the urinating man to stand there until he reads it. There is no way to obstruct his exit from the restroom in order to make a second offer “that just became available.”

Writers don’t have tricks. They either persuade you first to read and then to make a decision, or else they don’t do one or the other.

Writers leave their prospect free to choose. No tricks. Just persuasion.

www.markhorne.com
www.scrollquill.com

I was reading a book on business by one of the more famous freelance writers (while the book was on starting a writing business, the section could apply to any small business start up). The author was giving guidance for how to network at meetings and generate leads. One of his first points was this:

Do not try to sell services or products; that is not why you are there.

If you are using or starting or thinking about starting a corporate blog, you should keep this advice in mind. It applies as much to blogging as it does to networking.

Blogging is not like making a sells pitch. It is like going to an event, a meeting of some kind, and trying to meet people. Blogging is networking. You have your business card to give away; that’s your sidebar. But people do not come to your blog or leave comments because they have made an appointment with you to receive a sales pitch. They come for the conversation, the entertainment, and the information.

Naturally, you want your blog to generate leads. Who doesn’t? But trying to sell stuff will kill any chance of that happening. Just like it will be self-defeating when you try to meet people and network. No one will converse with you if they feel pressured to buy something from you every time you open your mouth. You generate leads from networking by being conversational, entertaining, and informative. That is what makes people interested in you and willing to take your business card.

www.scrollquill.com

www.markhorne.com

Posted also here.

“Five Words You Can Cut,” is a helpful reminder. I would have added “very” to the list (I almost used it in the previous sentence). My personal weakness is for “perhaps.”

What is you special weakness? What word attracts you but is not helpful to your writing?

Since one of my jobs at S&Q is literary agent, I found this blog entry by Colleen Lindsay to be really helpful. Here are the bottom line facts that she lists:

YA fiction 50k - 80k
urban fantasy / paranormal romance 80k - 90k
mysteries and crime fiction = cozies: usually 60k - 70k mark), most: 80k to 100k
mainstream fiction chick lit: 60k to 80k words; literary fiction: possibly as high as 120k but lately less; thrillers: 90k - 100k; historical fiction as high as 140k. Nothing under 50k.
science fiction and fantasy = Should be the same as adult fiction; a few editors consider 100k ideal for good space opera or fantasy; \ a truly spectacular epic fantasy: maybe 120k /130k.  (Sequels may be allowed longer)

On the last point made by Lindsay, I noticed the other day that the Inheritance Trilogy no longer a trilogy. It is now planned as a four-book series for exactly this reason. Christopher Paolini had the third and final book all planned out, but when he wrote it out it grew way too long (see the video here).

I have to wonder why Lindsay is dealing with so many gargantuan manuscripts. My suspicion is that writers are thinking only of “the story” and not about selling themselves to a publisher as a profitable person with whom to partner. Being obsessed with “the story,” is just fine if you don’t care about being published. But then why bother to even submit the manuscript?

Publishing companies have a great many expenses. No doubt they all hope that some one book will take off and be a huge seller. Who wouldn’t want to be the beneficiary of a J. K. Rowling popularity bomb?

But you can never plan on that. Rowling’s books are great but that does not mean that there are not plenty of other great manuscripts out there that no one ever hears about. One can’t plan to be a world famous multi-millionaire from writing a book any more than one can plan to win the lottery. And publishers can’t plan on that either.

What you can do with a reasonable chance of success is become a reliable hard-working writer who creates material that a publisher can trust to produce. If you have some giant of a book you must get published, your best chance is to succeed at conventional works so that publishers will give you a chance when you propose a mamoth book.

By the way, Lindsay provides a lot more commentary and discussion so make sure you visit her post.

Does history justify “spamming” a nightclub.  Fun comparison.

Let’s consider an analogy. Perhaps you have heard of Freecycle? Consider the precious items collected at this great humor blog, which we all know are genuine.

Freecycle — a fantastic community that’s also home to some of the most extreme social cluelessness and gaspingly funny avarice in the online world. This blog will document it all. Posts are reproduced unedited in their entirety, with only identifying information removed.

One might guess from this sort of phenomena that trying to find freelance work through a bidding website may not be a productive use of one’s time and energy. Here is one witness that such a guess is accurate. I’ll reproduce just a couple of his exhibits without his commentary:

I need someone to write 100 articles for a web site. I can only afford to pay $1 per article but this may lead to more work later. Also, all articles you submit will be checked through Copyscape.

I’m looking for someone to write 10 product reviews of (insert product type here). They need to be done quickly and I’ll pay $30. Just to be clear, that’s $30 for all 10, not per review.

I recently watched Arrested Development - Season One and got a sad chuckle at the mention of the video series, “Girls with Low Self-Esteem.” Wouldn’t it be great of sleazy productions would be that honest about what they are doing?

But it would also be a great title for one of these bid-for-a-writer sites.

WWLSE.COM — BID FOR YOUR PROJECT HERE!

The bottom line is that they are looking for people who think their work is of no value and their only hope for approval is to give it away cheap.

There are lots of howto books out there for those who want to be freelance commercial writers. Many of these books can be skimmed because, while quite helpful, they are also full of hype (or else they are simply trying to bulk up to be book length).

While this is quite do-able for reading, in my opinion, it is entirely insufferable in audio form. I have greatly benefitted from reading books that I think would have driven me insane if I had been forced to listen to them.

I bring this up, because it applies to my podcast listening. One essential element in starting a new (and it is still new to me) business, is feeling like one belongs to a new group. That is an intangible but highly necessary benefit which people crave, and it is the engine behind all sorts of networking, meetings, and professional associations. The attraction for these things cannot be explained simply by the purported value of the usable information one gains from them–even though without that information one might look elsewhere.

So I look for podcasts. And I have found that some types of formats are simply insufferable. Ultra-successful experts who claim they can solve all your problems simply don’t work for me. I want people who are still on the journey. Reasonably successful people who are honest about their lives their work and their needs for improvement are much more encouraging and helpful. (The other kinds of audio casts might be helpful if I could stomach listening to them.)

So, here are too “real” podcasts I have discovered recently and expect to keep up with.

• Freelance Radio
• Freelance America (warning: there is an “explicit” warning on this one in iTunes and, while that doesn’t seem exactly the right description, I would not listen to it with children in the room.)

Both of these are really encouraging and worth listening to.

Since one of my hats is consulting with businesses starting a corporate blog, I sometimes have to jumpstart topic ideas.

I thought this post from All Freelance Writing was pretty helpful.

Do you ever get blogger’s block - feeling like you’ve already blogged about everything in your niche, where you just can’t seem to come up with new blog ideas to write about? I do. I’d bet most bloggers do from time to time.

No matter how much you’ve written, you probably haven’t really tapped your niche (even if it’s a pretty narrow one). So, when these dry spells happen, how can you come up with blog post ideas to keep your blog fresh? Here are a few suggestions (using the “making money online” niche as an example):

[READ THE REST]

Among my other jobs, one aspect of my business is new media consulting. I recently had to deal with one of the most popular blog publishers for businesses and corporations, Typepad. While I know it is an excellent service, I ran into a problem that I have also encountered in one form or another with several different services. I still haven’t figured out how to fix it.

As I was on the phone with a client about their new blog, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing that many icons on the visual control panel. Since I use a Mac and was viewing the site through Safari, I wasn’t that surprised or concerned. I switched over to Camino and had a much better experience. But options were still missing. So I switched to Firefox (which is somewhat resource-intensive on the Mac, so I only use it as a last resort). I still could not see a simply image-posting button. It simply wasn’t there. I tried Opera. Still no way to post images.

Not a problem. I’m not married to the Mac. I have a PC in the house as well for just this problem. So I went to my PC. First I tried Internet Explorer and then the Windows version of Firefox. Still no way to post images. I searched the knowledge database and found the directions on how to post images. The included a picture of what the screen should look like, and it was different than what was visible in my browser. There was a button for posting images, which I was missing. I have no idea what could be wrong in the case of my PC, unless Typepad’s interface is only fully functional for the XP operating system rather than Vista.

As I said, I’ve run into this problem in other services. I can’t use Safari to post to any of my WordPress blogs anymore, because all paragraphs markers are stripped out of the entry. I typically use Camino.

Has anyone encountered this problem and, perhaps, found a solution. Posting images is a significant feature. I could work around it using html and an offsite storage for the image, but that would be rather clumsy. It would defeat the whole point of a WYSIWYG interface.