With over 40 years’ experience in both the advertising and publishing industries, Patrick Quinn is an expert copywriter, master wordsmith and author of over 21 books. Some of these books include: The Word Power series I, II and III, The Secrets of Successful Low Budget Advertising, The Secrets of Successful Copywriting, The Secrets of Successful Exhibitions and over 13 detective novels.
1. How did you get your start in copywriting?
I started my working life as a hot-metal compositor in a print firm and published my first book while thus engaged. It seemed to me that writing beat working any day of the week; and I admired the creative skills of the guys who produced advertising material.
Consequently, I blitzed just about every ad agency in London with begging letters. After one fairly drunken interview (the Copy Chief was the first alcoholic I’d ever met, but also the greatest copywriter on two legs), I was given a three-month trial. The Copy Chief and I developed a strong bond; and he took the trouble to show me the ropes, for which I am eternally grateful.
To demonstrate how close we were, this fellow and I would play poker dice on the phone, for money, when I worked in Ireland and the USA . You really do have to know your man to trust him at that distance!
2. Some people seem confused as to what a copywriter is and what exactly they do. Can you please explain?
A copywriter is someone who can sell product on paper. In other words, copywriting is salesmanship in print (or on radio or tv.) It’s the art of being able to communicate with a given market, in a language it understands. Our job is to help consumers make choices about products, and to persuade them that ours are the better bet.
3. What was your motivation to write the Word Power series? And what do you hope your readers will learn?
By definition, writing is a lonely job; and copywriting is no exception. So, when, at two o’clock in the morning you are struggling to devise a concept that will help sell a certain product, you need all the help you can get. Over the years, I filed practically everything I had written. Thus, whenever I was stuck for an idea, I’d go through the filing cabinet looking for something that might prompt a sales proposition.
From there, it was a simple step to collate all of the saved material into a book – Word Power.
I don’t know whether readers will learn much from Word Power, but what they get is a lifetime’s collection of concepts, headlines, taglines, copy openers, and payoffs, plus a huge lexicon of sales-oriented synonyms and phrases that they can adopt or adapt. Just the sort of thing you need when you are up against a deadline. And copywriters are always up against a deadline.
I get mail the whole time telling me what a useful book it is. Well, that was the object of the exercise.
4. What are the most important tools needed to become a successful copywriter?
A good copywriter needs three attributes. 1. The mind-set that helping to move product off shelves is his or her single most important duty. Copywriting is less about writing and more about selling. 2. The ability to take a complicated marketing brief and translate it into a simple, creative strategy. 3. The self-discipline to produce good material to ridiculous deadlines and against the odds. And to have fun while you’re doing so.
5. How difficult is it to break into copywriting if you have little experience?
Getting in isn’t easy, but it’s by no means impossible if you have the right attitude and an unshakeable belief in yourself. It’s all a matter of constantly promoting yourself and your abilities.
You have to approach ad agency Copy Chiefs and Creative Directors day and night until you succeed. Always bearing in mind that these people were once where you are now; and if they think they can trust you, they will help you.
In the past eight years or so, I have trained around 500 copywriters via my Copywriting One-to-One distance learning course. The vast majority of these people are now gainfully employed, either as ad agency staff writers or as freelances. My advice to them when seeking work mirrored the words of Winston Churchill. You must never give in. Never, never, never.
6. What have you found to be the most common mistakes made by new copywriters?
The most common initial mistake is to concentrate on the writing aspect of the work, rather than the selling aspect. Too many copywriters try to show the world how clever they are with words – to the detriment of the sales proposition.
When people are in a buying mood, they don’t want to read purple prose, they simply want to read about the benefits of owning the product. Like I always say: people don’t buy products, they buy the benefits of owning them.
7. You’re not only an expert copywriter, you’ve also written over 13 detective novels. Please tell us more about these books. Where do your ideas come from? How much research goes into one of these novels? How long do they normally take to complete?
There isn’t much to tell, really. They are 13 of the worst books you will ever read; and I wouldn’t recommend them. When I did them, they were simply exercises for me to improve my writing ability. The fact that they got published is a near miracle.
Where do the ideas come from? Who knows? My problem has always been that I have more ideas than the time to put them down.
The book I am relatively proud of, though, is the flying training manual titled: Ready For Take-Off. I wrote it while I was doing my Private Pilot’s License as a way of retaining everything that had to be learned.
Research is, of course, very important if you want a book to be believable. But I don’t really like doing it. So what I don’t know, I usually invent – which is why the novels aren’t as good as they might be.
However, I can knock out an 80,000-word book in about three months. What I have tended to do is sell a publisher an outline, rather than the complete book. (This ploy saves an awful lot of time writing the full work and then having it rejected wholesale.) And the three-month timeline is usually a stipulation in the contract.
I should add that writing a book, for me at least, means that there is no time for anything else. No television, no theatre, no nights out in the pub. It means that, every single day, I make an 8am start and, often, a 2am finish. And when the job is done, the relief is palpable!
8. There are many types of authors writing within a certain genre or market. You’re successful in many areas of writing. How do you find time to write in these various areas? Do you find any one to be easier than the other? Which genre/market is your favorite?
I am something of a butterfly, flitting from one unrelated project to another without too much thought about where it’s all leading. Certainly, I have self-discipline, and once I start a project I will go all out to finish it in short order. But I have a low boredom threshold and would hate to get into a rut churning out the same thing day after day.
The thing about copywriting is that you are working on different products all the time. This variety is very stimulating. It’s worth mentioning, though, that a copywriter’s brain has to be Teflon coated, so that nothing sticks. Otherwise, your mind would be totally clogged with all of this completely useless information.
How do I find the time? My philosophy is that when you work right through the night, you get to see some lovely dawns. So I work through the night often. My long-suffering wife is now very used to this peculiarity. Bless her.
You ask whether one genre is easier than another. My answer is that no writing is easy. If it were, everybody would be doing it! What’s more, if it comes too easily, then you are probably doing something wrong.
My favourite genre is writing for radio. I’ve written thousands of commercials and I’ve also adapted a couple of my books for radio. It is a wonderful medium, because what you are doing is painting pictures in sound. You are planting graphic images in the listener’s mind. With television, for instance, you provide everything the viewer needs – the audio and the visual. There’s nothing for him to do. But with radio, you have to make him use his imagination. Which is a good trick if you can do it.
9. What are you working on now?
I have just finished a police procedural novel and am about three chapters into another. These, I have researched thoroughly for a change. Why am I doing this when Ed McBain (whom I admire greatly) has done it all before? It’s simply that I can’t resist the challenge. But it’s also the sheer joy of watching those words go onto the paper and hoping that someone other than me will take the trouble to read them…and get something from them.
Purely incidentally, I also have five gigs in the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. I play drums…badly, but I do love it. (For fun, I’ve enclosed a link to my band site.)
10. What is your one most valuable piece of advice to any type of writer?
My first Copy Chief (the ineffable Joe Baker) once told me that self-indulgence has no place in any type of writing. You are not, he said, writing to please yourself, you are writing to entertain or to inform a market. Audience is king.
I have tried over the years to work to this dictum and to make my stuff worth reading. Whether it is or not is, I guess, arguable.
The only other piece of advice I would offer is: stick at it. No matter how often your material is rejected, just keep going. By all means analyse the reasons for the rejection and adjust accordingly, but don’t let it dampen your spirit. Some of the greatest writers the world has ever seen have been told by publishers, and others, that their work is of no consequence.
Always remember that nobody, anywhere, ever raised a monument to a critic!
If you have been, thanks for reading this far.
To learn more about Patrick Quinn and his books, please visit these links:
http://www.standard-bearers.com
