Writing copy is a huge, huge field. If you’re looking to get your feet wet but have a next-to-zero budget, or you tend to find you get bogged down with your copywriting and never finish a sales letter, then you might consider reading This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better by Neville Medhora.
The following is my honest review of the book, plus a quick guide to using it.
The Good
If you’re new to writing copy, the whole thing can get overwhelming.
You’re expected to know about psychological triggers.
You’re expected to know how to write calls to action, leads, headlines and benefit bullets. You might not even know what those are, let alone what goes into them.
You’re supposed to understand a target market and you don’t know where to start.
The good thing about Neville Medhora’s This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better is that it’s the bare basics – the stuff you should do before you know what you’re doing.
Really, copywriting in its basest form is easy; you have to use words to convince someone to take an action.
This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better is a great distillation of those simple bits that’ll get you started if you have copywriter’s block.
The Bad (Sort Of)
Any basic book is going to have a clear set of negatives, and they all stem from one thing: The basics.
This book is short. I mean, it’s about 50 pages.
It’s not exactly Breakthrough Advertising or the Gary Halbert newsletter collection in terms of ground-breaking content or complex psychological ploys.
But…
There are two reasons I’m writing this review even though this book is really short.
Firstly, the price.
Unlike the book I couldn’t review a week or so ago, this book is a short guide and it’s priced like a short guide. The paperback cost me about £3. If it had cost me £10 or more, I’d be spitting bullets about it. But it’s priced fairly.
Secondly, the content is not bad at all.
It doesn’t make great claims. It says it’ll teach you how to write better, and it provides a set of exercises that probably will make your writing better… if you use them like I am about to suggest.
How To Use This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better by Neville Medhora
In some of the reviews, people suggested that you read this book before you write copy.
I disagree.
This book, in my opinion, is best used after you finish your copy.
The strength of this guide is that it gives you ideas for making your writing sound more natural. So I suggest writing your copy (or anything else really) and using This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better to clean up the end result.
The Ugly
The ugly is the design. I try to be positive in my reviews, even when talking about the bad. But I’ve also got to be objective…
This book is ugly.
I don’t mean the handwritten look on the cover, which I kind of liked. (Incidentally, handwritten type fonts apparently instil trust.)
I’m talking about the interior.
It’s clearly been written up in Microsoft Word, and retains the same fonts that it was typed in. The tables and text boxes are the same default ones that Word uses.
It doesn’t look nice. You probably won’t care about that sort of thing, and I’m not even sure I do all that much, but it needs to be said.
Closing Thoughts
This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better says on the back cover that you should stop reading the back, and start taking notes.
You don’t need to take notes on this book.
This book is a quick-start guide for getting your copy on track, whether you’re starting it or finishing it.
It’ll take you about half an hour to read fully, and then once you know what’s inside, you can dip in and out to either finish a sales letter you’re having difficulty with or make your copy more readable in the editing stage.