Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Copywriting Secret: When You’re Writing Copy, Remember It

If you don’t believe your words, others won’t either.

No, this isn’t magic. Your belief in what you’re saying comes through in your words. Alternatively, it’s obvious from the words that you don’t believe in the product about which you’re writing: you’re faking it.

Occasionally one of my writing students will tell me that certain advertising copy is “cheesy”. Excellent. This means that the student picked up on the fakery. The copywriter didn’t believe his claims—and neither should you.

Unless you’re a sociopath it’s hard to tell untruths. So, copywriters want to believe their copy; it’s the only way they have a chance of doing a good job. But what if you’re writing advertising copy and you don’t believe in what you’re writing? That’s easy: you research, until you believe.

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Write A Book Fast: 2 Simple Ways To Make Writing Easier

Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, your writing process will go more smoothly if you write your blurb (book description) first.

Although you’ll rework your book’s blurb many times before your book is done, your blurb provides you with a destination before you start writing… And yes, even pantsers need a destination.

Write a book fast: start with your blurb

Begin writing your blurb with one-sentence summary: the reason readers will read your book. What does it offer? How will they benefit?

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Freelance Writing: Build An Amazing Writing Business In 2021

Remember the D word (discipline)

Sadly, the word discipline is out of fashion. Without it however, we can’t get anything done.

Disciple isn’t scary. Here’s all you need to do: discipline yourself sit at your desk every day and open your computer.

When you sit at your computer, you’ve taken a small action which breaks inertia. Although it doesn’t sound like much, it’s a powerful step.

My favorite “discipline” tip: tell yourself you enjoy your business. After all, what’s not to enjoy? You have a wonderful business: you’re in charge and you work the hours you please…

This attitude is your mindset. Clients respond to your enthusiasm and positive outlook. When you have confidence, so do they. 

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Avoid Decision Fatigue: 3 Ways To Conserve Energy And Get More Done

It turns out that making decisions is tiring. The classic signs of decision fatigue include procrastination and avoidance.

Rather than assuming that we’re being lazy, or indecisive, we may be spending our limited willpower and energy on the wrong things. Who knew that we commonly make thousands of decisions each day?

This article on decision fatigue suggests:

In many ways, your brain is like a courtroom.

Every decision requires time and energy. If you aren’t careful, you can backlog the judge and jury with frivolous cases—when to eat, what to wear, and what to do.

Even the simplest decisions you make every day can exhaust you. Decisions like:

• What to wear each day;
• Choosing which products, sizes and brands to buy when you’re shopping;
• Meal choices. Cook, or eat out?

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Can't Write? 3 Strategies To Try If You're Blocked

Write an email message to yourself about your writer’s block

Subconsciously, you know what’s causing your block. Write yourself a letter about your writer’s block. You may find that the reason for your block comes out in the letter. Perhaps it’s something trivial: you’re angry because you haven’t been promoted, or someone made you a promise and didn’t keep it.

Anger at someone or something often causes writer’s block. If this is the case, becoming conscious of what’s troubling you is often enough to release the block.

Even if you have no idea why you’re blocked, writing a message will release negativity. You’ll feel lighter—you may even start writing again.

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Business Blog: Do You Need A Personal Blog Too?

Ted’s primary goal is to create a successful business. He’s setting up a new content/ social media marketing company with several partners. His employer ran into difficulties last year, so he needed to find a new job—or create his own.

Ted’s personal blog needs a content calendar

He’s maintained his personal blog for several years and enjoys it. This blog is also bringing a side income. He’s got a following and has made deals with a couple of companies to promote their products.

I suggested that Ted create a content calendar for his personal blog. This made sense to him. He attends a couple of conventions each year. He’ll continue to cover those for his fellow hobbyists, as well as hobby-related news and products.

However, he doesn’t need to create everything himself. He can invite guest bloggers several times a month. Not only will his guests help his blog to grow, they’ll take the pressure off Ted.

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Fiction: Plotting And The Story Question

Beginning your novella with the story question in mind

In a novel, you might spend three scenes of your first chapter establishing your main character, the setting, and his situation, before the story question lights a fire under him.

Unlike a novel however, novellas get off the mark quickly.

I like to establish the story question in the first scene — if I can do it in the first few hundred words, all the better.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re writing a mystery novella. Your main character’s desperate for money. (We’ll call him Bob.) He must find money to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment.

Bob finds a big bag of money in an abandoned car parked in the woods. He takes the money. The bad guys come after Bob: they want their money back, or he’s a dead man.

The story question is: will Bob survive?

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Be Brave And Write Your Book: 5 Tips

1. You’ll write when you’re ready: be patient with yourself

I started writing around 15 years ago, very much the dilettante. Writing a book would be fun, I thought. When it stopped being fun, and turned out to be hard, I quit.

Of course, I started writing again a month, or a year or two later. I was happier writing than not-writing.

Whenever I stopped writing, I was very down on myself. That was a mistake. I stopped writing because I wasn’t ready. When I was finally ready, I knew it. All my previous bad experiences had become lessons — there were things I needed to learn, both about myself, and about writing.

So if you’re in a write-quit-and-write-again cycle, chances are that sooner or later you’ll be READY. Keep trying, and one day you’ll settle down and will find that writing is just something you do.

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Book Journaling: Make Writing Easier And More Fun

Before I started journaling each book, I had problems finishing what I’d started. Usually I got somewhere around chapter three — and stopped. The plot had become boring. The characters were irritating.

Then I read an article about Sue Grafton, who said:

“I write a journal for each of the novels. I usually keep the journals about 50 pages long, and create as many as I need.”

That struck me as a brilliant idea. I’ve been journaling each book, and not only do I finish the books, the writing goes more smoothly too.

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Book Marketing Research: Sell More Books, Starting Today

Something of which to be aware: marketing is all-encompassing. Promotion (what most people mean when they talk about “marketing”) is just a part of marketing.

Marketing also includes: assessing your books regularly (do the covers and blurbs appeal to your audience?); your books’ prices (it is time to switch to KDP Select?); your books’ availability on various retailers, as well as their formats (should you consider audio?)

Without book marketing research, you’re in the dark, and your promotions will be much less effective than they could be.

Book marketing: focus on minutes, rather than hours

When I’m coaching self-publishing authors in book marketing, I encourage them to experiment and discover short activities they enjoy.

If an author enjoys reading, so we might look at ways in which he could combine book marketing with his reading.

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Plan, Write, And Publish Serial Fiction In Four Weeks

Discover how to write serial fiction (a serial isn’t a longish novel)

Authors publish serials with varying degrees of success. A less experienced author simply chops up a novel into parts, then publishes the parts. This exercise is rarely successful.

Savvy authors know that while their serial has an overarching plot, each episode also needs to be a satisfying read on its own, even if it does conclude with a cliffhanger.

Plan, Write, And Publish Serial Fiction In Four Weeks is a master class in writing serial fiction. It’s structured as a four week program. Each week has exercises.

You can take longer than four weeks to complete the program, or you can zoom through it. Either way, when you’ve completed the class you’ll be well on the way to publishing and promoting your own serials.

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Write Your Novel: 2 Success Tips For Series

You’ve written a novel. You can’t stop thinking about one of the characters. Or perhaps readers tell you that they want to know more about a character.

You feel that the character has potential, and you’re wondering whether you should create a series featuring this character.

Vital: Ask yourself whether you enjoy the character.

A popular author once told me that she hated the main character of one of her series so much that she returned her advance to the publisher, rather than write the next novel. “I couldn’t face it. Every time I thought about him I felt physically ill.”

Let’s look at the tips.

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Write Fiction: 3 Tips To Create Page-Turning Suspense

2. Delay, delay, delay! Delay in every scene

Anticipation builds suspense. You need to delay, and delay some more, to build the reader’s anticipation, and suspense. Delay revealing information which closes an open loop.

The more you can delay, without annoying the reader, the better. For example, let’s say you’re writing a thriller in which your main character’s daughter is kidnapped. The daughter’s boyfriend has disappeared. Is he involved in the kidnapping? You may decide that he isn’t, but you don’t reveal that for four chapters.

3. Opportunities: look for opportunities to add suspense

You’ll find, as I have, that when you look for ways to add suspense, it’s simple to add it in every scene.

An easy open loop, and a great way to add suspense, is to use the “ticking clock” device. You can make this a major device in your novel. In the kidnapping story for example, the kidnappers could demand a ransom — your hero has 48 hours to find the ransom money.

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Freelance Career: 2 Essential Tips You Can Use Today

If you can write a coherent email message, you’ll do well. The demand for freelance writers has never been higher than it is today. And competent writers have never been more needed. Much of the content on the web is uninspiring, to say the least.

Diligence and persistence will help you to build an amazing career, with endless opportunities.

Of course there are pitfalls. I coach and advise many writers. One of the biggest challenges is a writer’s self-doubt. This invasive and insidious tendency poisons your career. Few writers recognize it as SELF-doubt… It’s self-inflicted and masked by anxiety and over-thinking, which engender procrastination.

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B2B Content: 2 Tips To Make It Interesting, Useful, And Reader-Worthy

No matter what the topic, someone needs that content. As content creators, it’s up to us to make it interesting, initially, for ourselves.

If the content bores us, we can fix it.

Here’s how. To make content interesting, become interested in the topic.

Try putting yourself into the readers’ situation. If you wanted to know more about X, what would you want to know? Why would you want the information?

That said, there’s a BIG challenge. If we don’t understand an industry, we need to realize it will take more work to get an initial grounding in it. Factor this research phase into your quote for the client. Sometimes, it’s just too much effort; offer advice to the client to help him to find someone who knows the industry.

OK, with that out of the way, let’s look at B2B content.

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