Painful. This book is one of the most painful reading experiences I've ever had.
I had ordered this book for some advice on breaking into online copywriting. Two or three times I just had to stop and double-check its Amazon.com rating. Four-and-a-half stars? Really?
Now, I don't doubt that the author has made a lot of money copywriting--his business has its own website and there are a dozen testimonials in the front of the book. In fact, the copywriting principles themselves seem pretty sound. What I could not handle were the two or three typos on every single page.
Some typos are pretty standard, like "its" for "it's." The book seems afraid of hyphens, as in "multi billion dollar industry," and "benefits oriented, keyword rich copy." It also has a loose understanding of title capitalization: "How many Articles Do I Write? When and Where do they End Up?"
Other typos are really head-scratching, like on page 61: "To give you an example of how keyword prominence is used on a real site, let'sconsideraprojectIdidforwww.batterystuff.com.Thekeywordphrasewas 'motorcycle battery.'" And again on 114 and 115, which has the phrases "get rid of the fl uff," "You'll fi nd when you do this," and "adjective fi lled ones."
Sometimes I had to read a sentence a few times to even begin to understand what the book was trying to say. On page 69: "You can see in the prior examples that we followed a certain strategy in regards to the headers. For the first one, 'Catchquick: The Easiest Shopping Search Engine on the Web!,' we used the company name, Catchquick, the most important keyword phrase - Shopping Search Engine and communicated a good benefit - it's the easiest on the web."
And on page 73: "Something else you could do - and this is a recommendation you don't hear very often is study the masters of writing - some of the best copywriters, like Bob Bly and others as well as some of the better direct marketers out there like Joe Sugarman 24."
The "24" in the last quotation was an end-note reference. The book starts out with those numbers in superscript, then puts them in line with the text, then goes back to superscript. But do you want to know the funniest part? Here's what the end note for 24 says: "Joe Sugarman." That's it. Nearly every end note is like that. The author tells his readers to check out something like 6smarketing.com and zephoria.com, then he points them to an end note that says, "6Smarketing.com/Zephoria.com." It's like the author vaguely recalled a high school English class that said end notes were important, so he threw some in there for kicks.
All through this book, I've been saying to myself, "The subject matter is important, not the proofreading... the subject matter is important, not the proofreading..." But you know what? This is a book on how to write, for crying out loud.
If this book represents the online copywriting industry standard, then there must be a whole lot of hacks and crooks out there. And if it doesn't, then why did I pay money for it?
