April Kelly Editing and Writing

Copywriting is a field where practice and education go a long way. If you find that you’re a good writer, the only additional skill you need is to write in a way that sells. Today we’ll look at a couple of different books which you can look into, as well as tutorials and lessons on the Internet.

Copywriting requires continual improvement. To paraphrase Stephen King, he said that copywriting, really writing in general, is a subject that you continue to learn about and improve upon indefinitely. Just as lifting weights every day develops those muscles, writing every day develops good writing skills.

Here are two good books on copywriting:

• The Copywriter’s Handbook. This is a great book for you to look at because it will give you an introduction into copywriting as well as learning what it will take to write the different types of advertisement materials. Copywriting is a very broad field in that what you write could be anything from direct mail to Web content to public relations materials.
  
• Copywriting. This book is a little different in that it explains both what it takes to be a copywriter as well as how you need to develop ideas and structure copy. This is a more fundamental book that focuses on what you need to do as opposed to explaining the different types of advertising like the first book did.
  
• The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. This book, written by the legendary Joseph Sugarman, outlines what you need to do to write copy that really sells.

If you cannot find these books within your local library, take a look at the following websites which can provide copywriting tutorials and lessons as well as more book reccomendations:

• http://www.sherus.com/business/copywriting/
  
• https://thecopywriterclub.com/ultimate-copywriter-book-resource-list/
  
• https://neilpatel.com/blog/75-copywriting-resources/

If you look online, you can find a great deal of websites which will offer you free tutorials on how to write good copy. This is also a critical skill when you are looking to start a website to advertise your services, because your written words are going to be the engine which drives your online sales.

You can have all the flashy graphics and animation that you want, but if there’s no content, people don’t stay. It is the people who write good content who have the greatest success.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for additional copywriting resources and I’ll add them!