Eugene Schwartz Rodale Rare Video Recording

uh before we get started like was i was researching a little introduction for uh our guest gene schwartz i was going through some industry publications and books and i came

across a couple of quotes that i just wanted to read i picked out three of the many that i came across one first one is if any writer has set the tone in style for successfully marketing books to

consumers it's eugene schwartz that i believe was in denny hatch's book in an issue of dm news i found no writer in the

business can match schwartz's energy intensity and ability to pile benefits on benefits on top of benefits and then the final one that i sort of liked and pulled out and

i don't have it referenced but it was the rite of passage for anyone entering this industry should be to memorize one of gene schwartz's packages after understanding the marketing creative and

copy strategy underlying it so that's really a lot of praise that has been written over the years of gene's writing abilities and his uh

direct marketing strategic abilities it's really an honor for me to be introducing gene schwartz today our first work experience together was in 1984 when i

worked with gene to write a new ad for mark brooklyn's practical encyclopedia of natural healing and at that time the the book had already sold i believe

several hundred thousand copies and was like noticeably fatiguing and gene wrote a new uh package for us that i think he's going to show today that doubled response and

went on to sell another million copies or more over time since that initial experience gene has written 30 direct mail packages for

rodale books winning 27 times his ads have sold almost 8 million copies of rodel books and have generated 200 million dollars in revenues for us

this track record is unprecedented in the mail order industry gene started in the mail order business in 1951 he began he began as a delivery boy with

a mail order advertising agency he was trained as a junior copywriter that same year and less than three years later he had already sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of books plants and

games through mail order in 1954 he started his own mail order business and he has since sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of almost every conceivable product through the

mail both for his own firms and as one of the world's highest paid consultants he's lectured and taught extensively and has built one of the most famous collections of modern art in the world

he's written nine books including breakthrough advertising which is considered a mail order classic and his latest book which we have cut a copy for each of you after jean's speech the

brilliance breakthrough how to talk and write so that people will never forget you it's like talking about great promises in responding to a question about his early success in

the mail order business gene simply replied i had wonderful teachers then today gene schwartz will take the role of teacher and convey to you what he's learned in his 40 plus years of the mail

order advertising so gene it's all yours that's wonderful um i'm delighted to be here i am so happy to be here i can't tell you uh as pat said i've had a

long relationship with this firm it's certainly if not the best among the very best mail order publishing firms in america

um it only does superb advertising and marvelous publication but the people here universally are

wonderful to work with if you're a freelance consultant and you work with the firm uh you run into all kinds of people and the people here have just absolutely been marvelous

and i've loved working with them they've been tolerant uh because i'm usually a week late with coffee uh they've been creative uh

there's a wonderful piece of copy uh which i just did and don't have because i didn't know it was a hit until i came down here uh in which the person who was in charge of it said

we got you copy today and uh we loved it we thought it was wonderful everything was so wonderful we'd just like you to rewrite it completely and uh this great tact

overwhelmed me and i completely rewrote it within two days incidentally and uh it did pay off i understand so it's fine um

i want to tell you what i'm going to do today or attempt to do today if you work with computers and i love computers um you can say to a computer that's

building programs with you or solving programs and non-um word processing tasks um after it's come up with a correct solution you can say

be transparent be completely open and show me every single step that you took now the computer has no

non-transparency circuits human beings have enormous amount of non-transparency circuits so the computer will then show you every

step it took by studying that you can learn how the computer is solved that computers are very inventive believe it or not um i'm going to be completely transparent

with you today this was not a suggestion of rosedale to me this was a suggestion of me to road dale i asked pat whether he would like me to come down and talk

um i like writing i like copywriting i like merchandising and um i think i've

discovered a few very simple obvious ways of doing this and i think it would be nice for you and the other clients i had if i came down

and talk to you about them so i'm going to tell you the complete truth i'm going to tell you anything you want to know i'm going to be completely redundant and completely infantile because i'm going to start at the very

very very simple things that you already know and then i'm going to work to some things that perhaps you do and do not know um let me start with the most important

principle of success in publishing in life on any task which you want to achieve goals and of course it is very simply hard work now i am

let's see if i got 27 out of 30 hits then i have 90 ratio which is pretty good okay i got that but not because i'm extremely talented or extremely creative or

anything like that i like to think of myself as working harder than anybody i'm tested against um

there are much better copywriters writing for your firm than i am um there is nobody writing for your firm

that i know of that works harder than i do and you have what i call the super bowl of mail order publishing here

uh what happens is uh you are given uh your gig at a book and you hire two copywriters and you don't tell them who's the other person and you say write the copy here write copy there

and we'll test it okay it is the super bowl it is the best in the world you know you're coming up against when you write for roedale you know you're coming up

against the best most talented brightest oldest youngest people in the world and you're going to have to beat them and how do you beat them

um the only way i know to beat people as inventive and creative as these these folks

is to outwork them and so i long ago invented a system of working hard that is extremely powerful

um let's say that i'm called and said someone says i'm going to send you a manuscript you're going to send me back copy in five weeks

okay the manuscript arrives the manuscript here now is about eleven hundred pages eleven hundred pages is a lot okay what i do

is i take the eleven hundred pages and i go through it in about two weeks how do i go through it i take the manuscript

and i underline or bracket the claims as i go through every page now i take a red pencil and i put it at the front and back of each claim and perhaps i'll

have three pages three claims per page or three pages without claims i am building at that time out of that manuscript

a summary a praise or what i call a vocabulary they're all equivalent terms i am getting the guts and the heart and the meat and the gist

out of that manuscript now i go through every single page it's 1103 pages i go through every single page when i am done

i as i am done as i am doing i send it over to my secretary or to a freelance typist and that person types up my vocabulary it will come back to me

between 50 and 60 pages they will be essentially what i see as the strongest points in the book now

i think it's important to know that i don't really have any ideas when i open the book i take the table of contents and i put

it to the side i don't even look at it i start at the first page of the book itself and i worked my way through the last page of the book i am not interested really in what other

people think is in the book i am interested only in the book itself um i want to come across

the claims as surprises i want them to astound me i want them to move me i don't want to come to them without a vision of my own okay

now as i'm going through tedious terribly tedious work can't be done more than an hour a day because you lose it after a while you can't read anymore

and so you have to only do it an hour a day that's why i take two weeks as i'm going through that i will get ideas of course in response to the ideas in the book i carefully

take them and i write them on a little piece of paper okay i don't do much with them i just scratch them out of my little short hand and put them aside

when i get back the vocabulary the vocabulary is in print and it's on a disk i put the disk in my machine and i'm ready to go i start with the top again and i start

now organizing selecting inspiring associating everything else again

finally i have a rough ad now if you put 50 pages into a computer into a single file the computer will not like you it will be very unhappy with this will have indigestion and it will

take a long time to go from back to front you may lose stuff etc so the computer will force categorization on you it will force you to force you to break it up into blocks and you will

find yourself pulling things out and placing them in separate manageable files so your first organization is dictated by the computer's necessity

then i write my beginning ad no headline now no sub headlines no flyer headlines nothing like that

just sheer claims when i am through with that three weeks have passed and the pressure is building up i can feel

the people down here getting very nervous and the phone calls sometimes sneak through uh how are you doing wonderful oh it's great yeah sensational i can feel the strength uh how about saying

this the envelope oh i can't do that right now i i want to refine it well i haven't even written the envelope i haven't the word of the envelope i'm still building okay

then i begin selecting those claims which are the most unusual and the most powerful i'll

explain how i arrive at those decisions and i began writing my envelope or i began writing my heads or i began getting the big type stuff

by the time i've done that the fourth week is passed and i now take everything i've done it's not finished yet but it's certainly taking shape and it's beginning to look like

what you're going to see when this stuff goes out and i go back over it with the manuscript i check it again i've made little notes i put a little

check something's wrong here something's missing or something hasn't quite gelled here so i go back over it again when i am through on the fifth week

and i send down the copy i want to know the book as well or even better

than the editor um i'm going to give it to you i'm going to spend a lot of time on this because this is what makes success there's

nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this i will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy

and careless and match him against the good copy cub and two out of three times the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other

person because the power of the ad for a book or a product any publication or any instrument is always in the product itself it's not

in the copywriter the copywriter simply finds it and expresses it okay i wrote a ad recently

for a book for a doctor who had never worked with before who was not a rodeo author at all and i sent him the copy and he sent the copy back

and one of the copies said you can eat fat meat and eggs and he crossed out the word eggs and i called him never spoken to him i said

doctor i i don't understand why he crossed out the word eggs and he said well um because i never used anything about eggs ace can could be controlled

and i said the doctor on page 164 there was a the sentence about eggs which i quoted and he laughed now why did he laugh he laughed because i am an amateur

he was criticizing an expert about his own text and i knew more about his text at that moment that he did when i heard that lab

i was very hopeful that the ad would succeed because i knew that much i spent half my time working on mail order copy i spent half my time

collecting art and i spent half my time writing my own books it comes to 150 yes and i'm very busy i damn but i also i recently have written a series of books on religion

and i was helping and working with one of the leading the leading christian avant-garde theologian in america a young lady who's absolutely brilliant and beautiful

and one in you know a book award national book award and she was asking me for some editorial comment on her book and she sent me 26 pages i read them and

i called her up i said i called her up and said this is wrong this passage of mark is wrong and she said but mark says these three words about pilate

and i said no and she laughed now why did she laugh because she's the best authority in america on that but she hadn't checked against mark

versus matthew and they blend in people's mind i had checked exactly the words and that check made the difference between her being attacked in the press

for being irresponsible and her being right at no cost i want to be more accurate and more knowledgeable

than anyone i come up against you want to be more accurate and more knowledgeable than anyone you want to come up against the person who is the best prepared and

the most knowledgeable makes the most money it's so simple he used to be a football coach at west point during world war ii his name was red blake smith

and he said the will to win means nothing without the will to prepare okay so the first thing is very simple but very important and if everything else i'm going to tell you it means nothing

without it you work if you'd like to make money if you'd like to live on park avenue if you'd like to have a world famous art collection work just work anyone could do it you're all brilliant you wouldn't

be here unless you're brilliant you work for a great firm work hard you get there okay i don't say you have to learn work impossible hours now remember that

um i work three hours a day every single day for five days a week uh that's all i work

i work three hours a day after three hours a day i get very tired and i go to work someplace else but it's enough that i can do this because i'm better prepared than anyone else

okay now how do i work what is the secret i've never had a writer's block i've done 30 ads for pat

i've done dozens of ads for boardroom dozens of ads for myself many ads for phillips stick benson etc i've written nine books i've written many articles i turn out a ton of

material continuously i never have a block i always love to write i never stare at the page for more than a few minutes what do i do okay it is tough

enormously difficult for you to sit down in front of a blank page or a blank screen and say okay i am going to create especially when you are working against

the world's best which is where you want to be against the world's best therefore you can't think about beating them

you can't think about how much pressure there is you can't think about how much money is involved you can't think about anything except what you're going to write on the page what you're going to take of course from

the party now how can you free yourself of all this anxiety all this blockage all the self-doubt that's very simple of

course what you do is use an old zen trick zen masters are enormously proficient they have been for two thousand years

uh and they have a very simple system which i use continually i use every day you walk into the same place that you always write at now there's got to be now when i say

right i mean work at if you do editorial if you're an accountable executive et cetera you're always at the same place at home or at the office i happen to work at home continually i don't write at the office i don't write anyplace

else in the world except one desk where i've written for the past 28 years okay that desk is a nice big comfortable desk with an incredibly sloppy amount of

paper all of it i create chaos i'm a great creative creator i like it because it gives these wonderful little accents okay you come in you've got a set time which you may or may not keep i never keep it at

somewhere around 9 30 it's usually around 10 o'clock but i know i'm going to be there every morning you come in and you do the same thing all the time

many people sharpen pencils i don't have pencils so i don't sharpen them but i certainly have my little pen which i live on and so i take that out i could take three of them out one two

three there there i brought in a cup of coffee i have one cup of coffee in the morning that's my coffee intake for the day i take the coffee i place it down i have a pitcher

of cream very important that i have a picture of cream by the coffee i take it and pour it in the coffee i take the spoon i rotate uh i take the coffee

i take my computer and i ask it to bring up the new rodeo ad i'm working on wonderful it does that there's the 50

pages staring me page one okay i take this device this is the liberator this is the thing that frees you from all the anxiety and all the lack of self-confidence in the world it is a

timer it is a punch-in timer and what i do with it is i do this i take boom boom boom boom

and i've got 33.33 minutes i then punch on and it starts ticking down now i put it down

and i'm set i have no goal for the next 33.33 minutes except to work on the copy okay now i don't have to work on the copy there's absolutely no necessity for

me to work on the copy i can sit there i can stare at i can drink the coffee um i can stare some more

drink some more coffee um i can do anything in the world except not get up from the desk not do any at that task um not even write my own name i just sit

there all right sooner or later get bored takes me my boredom time is about one or two minutes then i begin looking at the copy as i look at the copy i began paging up

and down the computer and as i do that something reaches out from that computer and grabs me and says hey aren't i beautiful

hey aren't i powerful hey start with me and okay i say okay this is great this is good but it's not quite phrased wouldn't it be better if we just took these two words out and condensed

it a little so i do that and then i go a little more and i see another one i do that and there we are i have no goal

that has anything to do except with the coffee and the thing that's staring me in the face so i'm not worried about the the test or the money or the overhead or the rent or the new car or the new

painting that's all gone i'm just working on that now what i do is i work for 33.33 minutes at the end of 33.33 minutes

this little thing rings it's very important to the ring you've got to get a timer the rings because you should be so absorbed that you shouldn't notice the time passing now we've got a timer in this room right

here besides this one which is that television camera which is staring at me that television camera has a 30 minute cycle i believe and what's going to happen at the end of

30 minutes is he's going to wave how many minutes have gone there four minutes late okay in four minutes from now this man is going to wave with me and we will have spent 30 minutes

together okay when he waves at me i'm going to stop i'm finished i am going to interrupt myself and you and we are all going to sit around and

do anything you want go to the bathroom talk scratch our heads do anything we want for five minutes but we're not gonna do any more talking we're not gonna do any more listening why

because when you're working you're not creating the whole secret is to know when you're working and leave work

and go on to creation what do i mean by that number one copy is not written if anyone tells you you write copy

sneer at them copy is not written copy is assembled you do not write copy you assemble it you are working with a series of

building blocks and you are putting the building blocks together and then you are putting them in certain structures you're building a little city of desire

for your person to come and live in you are not writing you are assembling you are assembling claims you are assembling images and you are assembling desires

that people will pay 33 dollars to share with you on a 21 day or 20 i don't know what is 21 day guarantee

so forget about writing anybody in this room who writes copy anyone in this room who works with copy must realize that the person they are

working with or the thing they are producing is not ready get that out of your head because you won't produce good copy the one thing i hate most in the world and shows me absolute

disaster is when somebody comes up to me and says wow that headline is so beautiful where did you get those words they're gorgeous i said oh god he's seen the words he's not

seen through the words he's seen the words themselves no good if you want to write poetry if you want to write prose if you want to write novels and if you want to write literature

go outside of advertising words and advertising are like the windows in a store you must be able to look right through them

and see the product if you see the window it's dirty and you're going to see yourself or you're going to see the mirror you're not going to see the product and you're going to lose

copy should never call attention to itself you should never know that you are reading sentences and the words should never pronounce themselves what you want people to see is the

visual visceral image of what the words are conveying

that is how it works uh you've got to break that fascination well of course you've got to have the right words of course you've got to have the punch

headline um but when the right words come the people don't see them they feel them

here sneaky little arthritis tricks four words

none of them is an exceptional word they're all pretty standard mundane words it is their combination

that makes their power one of the words is a word that should not be used in advertising sneaky because you know we don't like to sneak around people sneak around not very

appealing we don't want to be identified with those but when a person who has arthritis and has the pain of arthritis and the

humiliation and dependency of arthritis sees sneaky little arthritis cure cure a tricks and if they have gone to doctors and

spent hundreds of hours trying to follow doctors and not been able to be helped by doctors they know exactly what you're talking about

it isn't at all like um it is when you're alone i assume you're alone when you're right or working uh if you're in meetings etc okay but

i'm alone and um i have been working for 33 minutes and i'm going to work for one two three four five six 33 minute periods today

and i'm going to assemble and judge and read carefully for those 33 minute periods now

what am i doing when i do that um i'm following with somebody else's thought somebody else has organized some

material and presented me in their way they may not know the market as well as i know the market uh they may not have as much training in copywriting as i do

but they are setting up a sequence and they are setting up a vocabulary and they're setting up a tone they're all beautiful but they're not going to sell the book

so for the 33.33 minutes i have to be extremely logical learning malleable

dependent et cetera after that time when this rings i'm going to go into creativity okay now i hate words like creativity i

despise them because if you say the word creativity what does it mean it has no image inside of it

god created the heaven and the earth what god did is he took nothing and made heaven and earth you can't take nothing to make anything you're not god so what we have to do is

i have to replace that i think because i like operational words and operational words are words that you use to work from they give you a method

to work from so creativity to me is what i call connectivity of course it is the ability to take two ideas that

already exist that are in two different sentences or even in two different fields and put them together connect them and what you're doing when you're

creative is you're trying to connect two separate ideas that logically will not go together up until that moment um so you're looking for a connection you're looking for a brand new

connection when you have a brand new verbal word connection you have something that can startle your reader something that can stop your

reader something that can inspire move or sell your reader um we go back to sneaky little arthritis tricks again okay

here think about this for a minute let's talk about rodeo's position when they publish this book rodale has been selling books by doctors

or books by people who follow doctors for many years now at this time they've had much success and grown very beautifully suddenly

for some reason i don't know they come across a book about 700 people who did not follow doctors who went away from doctors the doctors couldn't ha help them

they had received through prevention letters from these people saying hey they couldn't help us but we did this on our own um and they published this this this absolutely marvelous book

all right people go away from doctors when the doctors can't help them when the doctors can't help them of course they stay with them it's very simple

but when patients are given very strong drugs by doctors and go into copper bracelets let's say

they feel very bad about that they don't want to do it because they really rely on these doctors um they feel guilty and that was the thing that came through

these people were saying i had marvelous results fabulous results but i don't have uneasy about it what's happening what will the doctor say will he catch me will he take away my strong

drugs etc so i'm doing this putting all this together these wonderful quotes these inspirational stories

and all of a sudden you know i'm i'm often left field someplace and the four words just come by themselves i don't write them i don't

assemble them i don't do anything sneaky little arthritic arthritis tricks they come bam they're there okay um i have created this four word

combination once that comes to me people talk about the muse the news means that your unconscious mind is delivering something to you

um what do you do with it if you got to make money on it if you want to set new records and sales with it you have to push first you put it up and

then you see what can i say after that and then we have sneaky little arthritis tricks red line with natural foods and do it yourself

secrets the pain proofed over 100 men and women like you now the first is a catch a hook

the second is sort of a proof we're talking about natural foods we're talking about do-it-yourself secrets we're talking about being pain proof and we're talking about men and

women having proved this for you so you don't have to prove it yourself that's the second line the first line gives this wild claim the second line makes it doable

and then there are these immensely beautiful pictures wonderful pictures from your art department and what do they say all symptoms disappear and not return this beautiful

woman walking the man was being kissed by the child after another day after another 10 days i felt cured and even the rheumatoid nodules were disappearing and this

lovely looking lady i have found my salvation it was my not it was my idea not the doctors and it's better than any medicine he has prescribed at the stage

so the envelope is the main piece complete mailing piece you don't have to open it you can just open it take out the coupon and send it in we'll discuss that later

i'm talking about how the first part of the envelope came now creativity is a natural gift it is built into you by two billion years of in

evolution the only thing that makes creativity hard is we don't know really how to become creative we don't know really how to become connected

so we say how do we become out of the conscious mind into the unconscious mind again we run up against the block because conscious mind doesn't mean anything unconscious mind doesn't mean anything either except

some mystic term and that doesn't do us much good so i think a much better word is the focused mind to the unfocused mind your mind is a very large network

um of cells which retain thoughts or images and translate the images and thoughts back and forth uh the mind has

a vast network of these cells but it specializes in using only a certain amount of cells at any

particular gaze and so when you look at something if i look right there i can only see this part of the room and not this part of the room this is blurred this is quite in focus

if i look at their sneaky little arthritis tricks i can hold seven bites or seven words in my conscious mind at a

time that's why we read sequentially that's why we invented writing that goes along a line and interrupts itself goes along another line interrupts itself goes along another line

we can only hold seven of those now that is our mind focused seven images

words at a time now surrounding those seven is this huge penumbra this huge sausage

of other ideas which are turning around they are not focused they are unfocused and they are floating around okay when you are focused

and you pay attention you only concentrate on the logical things that come into your mind the things that you are paying attention to in the other stay out when you want to become creative when

you want to get new connections to those seven things in the center you've got to get out of there and that's why we work that's why we work for 33 minutes while we play for five minutes the brain connects when it

plays when it works it thinks uses logic etc but it doesn't connect doesn't make these crazy connections the best example of that

i've ever seen and there are a lot of good ones is the movie amadeus about mozart mozart was a very unusual man died at the age of 32 i think

and he never rewrote his music he always if you look at his scores every note was put in place and it was never changed

it was though he just wrote it from god and then sent out to be played but it wasn't he had a very simple system of escaping

his focused conscious mind and it was on a bigger table he always had a bigger table everywhere he went and he would stand and he would have his pin

and he would have his score and he would have the billiard table and he would have the cue ball and he would take the white ball

and he would in his left hand and he would throw it out and so it hit one two three sides and came back to him then we'd pick it up catch it as it came back throw it out one two three sides come

back as it went and this little journey for those three sides he wrote a note then he picked up he threw it again

wrote the note while i was traveling picked it up again and he wrote one note at the time every three times it hit why it's very simple of course uh

his conscious mind if you throw a brilliant ball out and his three or three hits three of those sides the sides are soft enough that they randomize the billiard ball doesn't

become a predictable trajectory it will vary slightly therefore your conscious mind must watch it change its direction as it goes out you can't turn it into your unconscious mind

so your conscious mind becomes your focus mind becomes trapped in watching that but your ball your unfocused mind can therefore use this entire range

to furnish you with the note you're looking for if you're mozart this is what we do now i have written more headlines well i shaved

than while i've ever been at the computer i just i get these incredible i have pads i'm such a slob i have pants all over the house and i always carry even when i'm

showering i carry a pin honestly and i write right right right right here's the here's the idea i'm looking for and if you get into the habit of doing this of letting yourself go

of having fun of letting anything in the world come into your mind even though lots of it's going to be thrown out eventually as you begin going especially on vacations i write most of my best ads

and most of my best books are written in the margins of other people's books on vacation uh what happens is that you're down there listening to a watching this gorgeous ocean this beautiful cloud

listening to a cd player and you're always working on nothing but your mind suddenly begins spouting forth this stuff and you see you just

scratch down as fast as you can write and you want to go into a freeing frenzy you want to go into a creative frenzy you want to have the ideas come in so much into your mind

that you can't stop them in the same way never work on one thing at a time i work on one book one article and one ad

at the same time i will spend an hour with one of them an hour with the second of them an hour with a third of them that's why i say three hours okay

when i am working on the biography of jesus christ in the year 33 a.d

i will get such marvelous ideas for rodrigo out of nowhere and i will scratch them down now it's silly but the creative unfocused mind is by

nature silly so it is called by gardener james gardner who's the best psychologist around the creative

triangle when you are working on simultaneous projects continuing simultaneous projects one will feed the other and by allowing yourself to go from one

to the other your unconscious mind can work on one while your conscious mind is working on the other and this is like a ping pong three sided ping pong so that is creativity

okay let's talk about writing manning pieces what does a mending piece consist of

every one of the many pieces i have here most of the mailing pieces i have seen has separate elements the first element of course is the envelope

contained within the envelope there is a series of um letters flyers sub flyers

inserts lift letters etc and there's another blank the entire idea is to get the people to go from the envelope

to the order blank everything in between is you know subsidiary to that it's just there because it helps okay i am sitting here at this desk which is

much like my desk and i've done my three hours of writing and i'm ready for lunch and then i'm ready to do whatever i'm going to do for the afternoon but i've got to do the

mailing then i hate the mail i like the mail because i make money from the mail but i hate the mail because it's a lot of stuff so here i am this is all elementary and you've heard

it a dozen times before but it's imperative so i take my mail and i go like this go like this like this go like this aha

go like this go like this aha two piles this pile is dead you have lost money you are wiped out you will never see the inside he will

never sign the order blank he or she this pile is the act of pile he will come back to it she will come back to it she will look at it now

at the top of both of these is what is usually called the headline sneaky little arthritis tricks a new generation of natural home

remedies and the question has always been it's an extremely good question is what about the headline what does the headline do how long should the headline be how many

headlines can you have on an envelope etc okay when i first began writing copy the accepted belief was that

there should be a single headline and the singles headline should lead into the copy um if preferably the headline should sell the product

or give an overwat present an overwhelming claim it should have tremendous power the key word is power power to sell power etc i hate that

the headline is absolutely nothing in the world to do except one thing get you the read the sentence underneath the hemline the sentence underneath the headline has

absolutely nothing in the world to do except one thing get you to read the sentence that follows it the sentence that follows it has absolutely nothing to do except get you to read the sentence that follows it

okay the headline should not try to sell it should not try to identify the company it should not try to present overwhelming power

all it's going to do is get you to read the next the prospect to read the next line that's all everything else is subsidiary okay sneaky little arthritis tricks is

only there so the person will read with natural foods and do it yourself secrets that pain-proofed over 100 men and women like you why because all you've got to do is get

them into this habit of reading one line after another line after another line they should read every line of preferably on this envelope

they should then want to read more and turn over when they get here they should preferably read that and then they should preferably

open now on the back we talk about youth pills giving away free and the last line on the back is

see other age reversal miracles inside it's nice if you can ask them to move inside give them some reason for opening up the envelope the big problem is to

get them to open the envelope okay i would say in general that the headline has been replaced by the envelope

the entire envelope the front and back are your sales pitch you can have hundreds of words

on the envelope they don't have to be headlines all they have to do is be tantalizing um i love

the fact that for a while we all could use these marvelous big things it's something that's a brand new piece which is also being sent out at the present moment um because they give us a

lot of room and we can sell and sell and sell improve improve improve and demonstrate and demonstrate so that's wonderful okay you get them to open up that's all you

have to do all you have to do is get them to open up they take it out and the first thing that approaches them is the letter usually it doesn't have to be there's no reason for it to be but usually the

letter is and it says what arthritis doctors don't tell you conventional purposely conventional uh because they've had so much um

hitting here that i simply want to make it very soft here and then the first next line is unbelievable as it may sound dear

friends about 100 of our participants of four 100 men and women who have suffered for years from the agonies of arthritis no longer see a doctor a physical therapist or any kind of

practitioner for arthritis treatment for example and then we go into a series of case histories and the entire

the entire six page letter is case history what is a case history a case history is a proof of someone that acted as your surrogate

to prove the product so you don't have to take a risk with it then we have the flyer the player is devoted to doctors

provingness doctors what the doctors say about this that's all on that and then you have the flyer for the forever young premium

okay you have to do two things in all this material number one you have to pile belief upon belief upon belief desire upon desire upon desire

number two you have to give them an escape route there are some people who will absolutely love to read every word and you have to satisfy them there are some people who will read not

that much they don't want to and so they'll go at that point especially if you have a money back guarantee a free 21 day trial they'll go directly into that okay um

that answers the question is how long should copy be the copy should be as long as you need to contain the claims and not bankrupt

the company that's sending it out but always remember that within that copy the person can cut out at any moment

so you want to give him on the envelope in the first page of the letter and the flyer enough to be a complete mailing piece to

convince him to try so the people who can't stay with you or don't have the time or the interest to stay with you you can order anyway you can try you've also got to remember that

you're never selling anything and never ever ever ever ever sell anything in mail order you always ask the person to try something the book will sell itself

a lot of people know that now and of course the return is large because they don't like the book well that's wonderful but at least they've tried the book and they'll try the next one

in conjunction with that you have to ask the question who are you writing to very important question absolutely essential

are you writing to a man are you writing to a woman are you writing to an individual or both sexes are you writing to a mass audience what

is your audience for this unless you know that and can answer that then of course you can't really direct your copy to it the answer is very simple

um but two faith you're writing to an individual a single person always who shares a problem or a desire

with a huge mass of other people now better than that you identify the problem arthritis very large minions

with the person who is getting the mailing piece which also leads you to the most powerful word in english language

and the most powerful word in english language is not yes and it's not free it's you and the word you is absolutely determinative

in publishing mail order publishing and mail order marketing i editorially

when i see someone say take the hands and apply the cream to the face i go crazy because there are no d hands and there

are no d face there is only your hands and your face so the first thing the copywriter has to do the first remedy if those things are

there the copywriter has to apply to the editorial just change all the d's to all the u's now when you begin to work from the position of the u

then you begin to see that the u is highly individuated and that this single person who represents this mass of people are completely unique

and you have to be able to find out their uniqueness and be able to talk to it when i did the arthritis this is

when i did the arthritis i had never met anyone intimately who had arthritis therefore

i didn't really know much about arthritis but the people who wrote the book the people who wrote the letters that made up the book knew intimately

about arthritis and i found that they talked a language was completely incomprehensible to me nsieds this kind of drug that kind of drug

so i determined that i would try in the copy to use as many technical terms as possible because those people were familiar with those technical terms they had been with doctors for years and

failed and therefore that would make it more youthful not youthful but youthful your your copy has to be you full of use

and the you has to be so the person can identify you must be that person um now brings up another general thing

which is for every profession no matter what you do success is extremely lonely and if you want to be successful you

have to accept the loneliness and you have to accept the extreme modesty and humbleness that success demands i'll tell you why

you have to know the person that you're going to ask for something if you're a salesman if you're a lawyer and it's a judge etc you have to know that personally there's

only one way you can learn that and that's to listen the greatest asset after hard work is the ability to listen you have to listen to several different

layers out there in order to be successful you have to listen first of all to the person who has whatever you've got the problem you would you're going to try and solve

you have to know that person so well that you can sound like him and he will mistake you for his mirror image um you have to know the kind of society comes from the layer

of society coming and finally you have to know the society so when you go to a party when you get in the taxicab when you're with somebody on a bus or a

subway your job is to ask questions show appreciation and listen i was born in montana and that is one of

the great heritages i ever got because i spent 15 years in one of the smallest most backward cities in the united states midwest

i never lost my mother used to say you could take a boy out of blue montana but you can't take b montana or boy she's right okay i don't want to lose that i think and i feel just like

80 percent of the population in this country when i went to new york i became extremely sophisticated and i now hang out with extremely sophisticated people

and that's horrible and what i do is i constantly get away from it get away from it get away from that

i would suggest that you do that too uh when you reach your level of success you are in danger merchandising merchandise is thinking about what's

done you lose this kind of feeling and you've got to keep it you have to artificially recreate that environment that's the environment you sell in that's the environment that feeds you that's the environment you must be able to breathe in

that's why i say the required reading for you is all the junk magazines in the united states i would go out tomorrow and get

a subscription to the national enquirer and read every single word in it that's your audience there are your headlines there are your people and their feelings

i would definitely get vanity fair i would watch the tabloid television shows i would i do i do always i get in trouble when people walk into

the house and see the piles of this stuff but i love it if a movie does a hundred million dollars or more especially if a movie does 200 or 300 million dollars or more

i would go to it two or three times i would especially recommend joe's silver movies go out and get all of your joe silver movies and watch them over and over again joe silver did such immortal

classics as uh lethal weapon one two and three uh deathwish six seven and eight uh pretty woman which is a great movie anyway but

you've got to sit in front of lethal weapon one at least i mean honestly this is the greatest training for any merchandiser in the world especially copy people etc

you got to sit in it three times if preferably sitting at least two times or one night and you've got to be honest now wait wait let me explain all right let me explain

you've got to pick up the rhythm and you've got to see how silver who is absolute genius spielberg and silver are the two great communication geniuses of

our country at this moment every time it's great take a stopwatch time every three minutes he throws another blast at you there's another hedge being smashed against the windshield there are

another 50 people being blown out of an airplane and then there's a few minutes of dialogue which means nothing and then there's another valve all right now what you are doing

is you are writing joe silver copy you don't write i don't write this this letter is not a series of paragraphs

this letter is a series of headlines these paragraphs are brains smashing against windows believe me every one of them can be

taken and put up here you've got to give them the punch you're asking someone to read hundreds of words spend 15 20 minutes with you in a busy day you've got to give them that charge in charge

and charge and charge joe silver moves you better know really this is an isolated group we deal with the older audience

uh so you better know all the older songs all of the great hits of the 50s and 60s you're better you know you better they still reverberate they still make people feel

um it might also be good to know have a the top 10 teenage movies now they have movies and hits and songs okay

unless you know people live by hidden desires imperative for you to know i was at phillips i gave somewhat the same lecture um

question answer period there was this extremely disturbed young man brilliant man put up his hand and said how would you sell a 99 investment letter what would you

research tonight for a 99 dollar an investment newsletter to the finest people in america i said wall street gecko he said gekko remember wall street there was a terrible promoter called

gecko he was a real slime every one of that man's readers wants to be gekko he wants to be square honest and uncaught gecko you've got to know where your people are and you've

got to place up to the reality that we have shameful desires and some of the great desires you're giving people health but you're also giving them that okay i'm going to rush

um heaven and hell very interesting to think of your merchandising is present your person is here in the center and here is hell

and here is heaven what you are doing is presenting him with the opportunity to go to heaven and escape hell think in terms that dramatic the

absolute agony of arthritis mercy versus a pain-free healthy life for the next 50 years heaven and hell you are talking in dramatic terms

you must realize that your people are the finest people in the world you must have that firm belief americans are the nicest people in the world

they are fair they are honest they want good things they want good things for themselves and their children they are very intelligent it's incredible to see people that other people think are not

intelligence and really talk to them and let them open up and make them unafraid to open up and find out how smart they are but they are not giving you their full attention

their full smartness etc they are giving you part attention and you must be very dramatic to get through it's like a painting on a wall if you

make the painting very small on the wall and somebody's over there they can't see it so you make it very big and with great deal of contrast and they can see it so you have to be melodramatic

and be fair and be honest and fill your stuff with proof and they will respond they are good people we've often sent out two books in my

company we've sent out two books to the same person we do it all the time because sometimes they slip through and we continually get those books back from people and they say you sent us two books and they paid two dollars and fifty cents to send them back to you

they're wonderful people okay and then also the thing the engine that moves mail order copy can be summarized as the contrast

between the claim and the mechanism what do i mean by that you make a strong claim that's easily obtained the claim

and the mechanism i wrote an ad for this company a long time ago called tricks of the trade so powerful they can change your life i think around for eight ten years something like that is pretty strong

one of the lines was a way to vacuum dust from drawers without removing their contents okay it doesn't sound possible right how do

you do it okay so you've got a very strong claim with a very strange uh mechanism so what the person has to do is he has to go to page 71 and find

out you got enough of these they'll do it now as you begin to develop as a company and a person within the company what you're going to find is

you're going to run as a claim exhaustion claim exhaustion is the fact the claims all begin to sound the same after how many ways can you carry arthritis how many pounds can you tell

the person you lose you get into the point where everything looks the same it blurs when you get to that point your copy is going to have to make up for the claim

the copy is going to have to give a way of doing this or a way of achieving this that is so strange that the person will believe it all over again enough to try it

now the master of that boardroom has evolved a style in which the mechanism is as important as the claim

and if you look at a boardroom piece by the great great great and revered mill martin you will find that the claim doesn't sound so intense

what never to read on an airplane um bill's okay to pay late they're nice but they're not overwhelming they sound very little most copywriters can't figure out

how they pull they pull because there's an implied mechanism there that you would like to see one of his greatest things is

you can't cash a unsigned check right wrong see page 72 what is this what is this miracle way

so the more your field progresses the more the claim density that came before you that you have to fight even your own stuff the more you have to twist that is

called a twist twist first twist and let me see if i've got anything else and then we'll go into the questions i just made a little few little things we call these can't be dones

it's a lovely way to think about it you try and get yourself a mechanism and imply a mechanism for a medium-sized or very very big claim but better for a medium-sized claim because it's more

believable and then gives something that simply cannot be done and then the person will have to send for the book to see how it's done he will even send for the book if he doesn't believe you because he wants to

prove you wrong because it itches and he can't sleep at night um okay um a lot of nice things

that this company has helped me do this is something that was strictly done for this company i mean i do other things like this now i'm sure the

company does other things like this too but this is an overloaded envelope it is not like this envelope which is beautiful and full of illustrations is a rather ugly envelope it's beautifully done by the

art department but what could they do when they gave them this much coffee all right i apologize to the art department but look at the number of claims you've got 37 different claims on the front of the

envelope and on the back of the envelope we've got almost 50.

okay this is a wonderful sales medium and i think it was invented here working with these people um

it is a you are able in this company to you know really pile in copy on the envelopes and this i think was the first company that really threw copy on the

envelope i also want to say in closing oh yeah here here's a lovely can that can't be done uh unspoken rules that make or break

your career okay how can you know a rule that is unspoken that's going to make or break your career very good headline because people have

to find out what it is um every company comes up against the fatigue factor the faith factor is the mailing that sells like mad the first time through

and then sells less the second time and after x number of emails fails the poll what you do is absolutely

right on you simply take the product and you assign it new copywriters this is for uh healing foods which was absolutely the original one

which was the the doctors identified the 75 most healing foods in the world with the big carrots on it but one of the best pieces of coffee i have ever seen in my entire life to buy one of the best layouts i've ever seen

the only way i could even compete against it is go completely around it throughout everything that the previous person had done and create a new product now

you got to realize that a product is not a book you do not sell books you do not sell magazines you not sell newsletters

you see you sell bundles of do's functions things that the thing will do so that when you get a book and it gets tired what you have to do is

go in and get a whole new set of dues so i went in and got a whole new set of news doctors founded by new fur food cures which hadn't been planned up before and then there were quotes from

the doctors on the side and i've outpulled this great piece that came before it of course the old piece had been a little tired and been around but nevertheless it did so never say a particle is dead

unless you've exhausted all its fun those who lose so let's talk ask me what you like can you suggest five topics uh yeah

chinese medicine dao tao um indian medicine you know how strong you need a medicine is you know

what depressed chopra or whatever his name is selling in the stores i think those are the two big ones sooner or later and i think you've done it there's going to be a sort of a

combination of psychological uh healing uh and physical healing and nutritional healing which will go through the roof but i'm i'm not sure about that right now

yeah okay you were here i'm just curious about the demographics of who's buying uh your is it dr chang yeah who who's buying that is is that is that

a younger audience than the traditional prevention audience or is it the older audience that's actually going for it now um the chain is the only book we have that cuts

through all the boundaries uh most of the books came after dr chang we have to take selected parts of your list with dr chang at up until this year

uh i'm not sure about because i made one mainly this year and it could have it was right during those snow storms so i don't know what the hell they have to it um um it always cut right through

um you got to realize i'm extremely primitive and you're extremely sophisticated and we're talking about two different corporate cultures facing each other interacting i do not do focus groups demographics

of anything um i just write an ad take the ad test it every so often retest something against it and that's it

but i know that anything you feed me in male health book buyers non-television paid and female health

book buyers non-television paid and prevention and per and one provincial prevention plus one health book and the prevention book club you know they kind of go out

and they come back now you don't pull tremendously well your list don't pull anywhere near as well as health and healing but they're consistent and i have never

lost money on your list and because you have such large amounts of names of course they give me a great deal of names that i can then rent again as the pan has said we duplicate 32

on our uh on our list so we can see the tremendous resemblance between the two firms the big difference of course is that my firm up until this moment has had many more men than your percentage

men than yours uh this will be correctly imagined by the uh the sex thing when it comes to alternative healing and alternative medicine it seems to be there's a school of thought people are

either on this side or on this absolutely so you know determining who who is it that's crossed that cross over whether it's somebody as you

say that hasn't been helped hadn't been able to be helped by a physician or doctor and that they they're looking for some some way to alleviate the pain

all right let me be real wild uh number one answering your question then i'll answer the lady in the back's question but because you gave me a thought for her um the uh

you know you're just selling two percent you're selling two or three or four percent of your audience so you don't care about the the vast thing in between of course you'd like to sell eight or nine percent but you're not going to do it um

they seem to uh they seem to cross over very well um if you look at the most successful one of the most successful i think the most successful but i'm not that familiar with that field so i don't have

the figures for my tongue's health magazine there's a conde nast magazine which is something you should all look at anyway it's a magazine which is like a rodeo magazine

it's um they have very good alternate healing articles and they get very good response to those

alternate health articles and they are younger women much younger women you women you uh traditionally reached the over 50

women um i know them very well and uh i i know there's there's no secret they can get one of their little reports um i don't work for them i just have to

know them the lady in the back uh asked me five titles i gave her two titles so let me give a third one uh i know where you can do it but i'd

love to see you do it i'd love to see you do a book uh about uh not seeing your doctor we've got a book called how to stay out

of the doctor's office which is going like mad at this particular moment uh we're doing it in a very ugly way i'm going to revise it to do it in a very more

scenic ways or something like you do people love it people love it um as when i started working for you

there were several trends in your book production and one of the things i emphasized in my own copy was the doctor thing this is home remedies

either tested by proven by or developed by doctors and i thought that would be extremely powerful because he could use their credibility and uh you know

uh like this natural healing thing uh is so powerful that even doctors are using them that was one of the first times that appeared in your stuff um this is extremely powerful but

is there another group of people i know your list pays off very well for me on that even though my format this mattress um this is something you might be able to do i don't know but it might be something you could but i don't know how

that would relate to your other books wild okay yes gene have you ever written for tv no

i've never i started out as a i started out as i started as a radio copyrighted and had immense success there in 1948

i then wrote two of the great television mail order television programs john nagy's art book and somebody else's

piano book where we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of 395 a month for years um i have not

in 1949 we invented the infomercial by taking the question man program which

was on wor and adapting it to our piano course where for 15 minutes for 15 to half an hour they talked about should your child your child

play the piano should a child with one arm play a piano well pianos men broken marriages and then giving the names and uh

did fantastically well um then i got into other things and then uh in the last period

i just haven't done uh television uh you see it can't do it i mean i can do it give me an assignment i'll do one for you

but uh and i think i'd be very good at it i'm very visual but um i just haven't done it for myself because i don't want to deal with the production problems etc i have a very

good life and it's strange that i don't want to extend it that much you've mentioned that the uh the buyers of our books that come in through tv don't buy as well for for

your family and that's the same thing we see of course these are people who've ordered the book and paid for the book you know through the mail and through tv what what do you think makes the difference between those

audiences are you doing a 30 minute or two minute two minutes okay well it's very simple oh my god it's easy and uh michael fishman really knows this backward and forward

he's tremendous at this and i love to talk to him um think of what the person has committed who buys your book

if i send them this monster or this monster well this person really and honestly

spends 15 minutes to a half hour with this thing he really devotes a great deal of time to it so what he's not doing is just sending you a check for twenty nine dollars he

is he's sending you 60 30 minutes and 60 minutes actually 30 minutes here and at least 15 to 30 minutes with the book so he is devoting a great deal when you get a person who has two

minutes he is not doing anything like that you've got him for two minutes he may be hooked on the two minutes because your commercials are enormously clever and have marvelous twists on our mar i love

them they're they're they're they're record-breaking in their history making um but that person is not showing the kind of discipline if you wish to call it

that the other person is if you made a 30-minute infomercial and then got those people i would grant you a guess

that you would they would be very good for you that's what i think the whole difference is different type of person different commitment the reader the prospect the buyer must make a

commitment towards your product and if you have a similar commitment you'll have a similar type of sale i think okay oh i'm sorry go ahead i have a question about your 18 or your 28

successes and how you feel about premiums and why you would choose one why you wouldn't why do you think our audience why it works for our audience and maybe not other products i'm sorry i missed the

first sentence about 20 years about premiums and why you would choose to use one when you start a package a premium booklet i still i'm sorry i'm starting 28

successes 28 successes 27 ads that you've written for us oh i'm sorry 27 20. thank you very much

i like that let's make that official okay so at 26.8 27 successes out of 30 and why i choose what to use a premium or not to and why do you think they it works for our audience

oh you choose your premiums and then send it to me and i write them i agree entirely with the fact that every book um

should be offered with at least one and sometimes two premiums we offer a lot of books now with two premiums and then on the uh the diet book now we've got two premiums um

people will send for the book to get the premium it's as simple as that um they will get the book

open it put it away take the premium put the book in the package and send it back you want those people to try your book for any reason well the whole reason you send this out is to get

the people to try it for any reason you can people love something free your premiums are exceptional my premiums are very good too

you have a wonderful way of manufacturing premiums recycling premiums that is absolutely irresistible you simply take old book chapters and you put them into a premium uh the

person is happier when he gets a premium you never sell in mail order anything once you always are going to the next sale you're always playing pool

you're always sinking the ball and at the same time you're getting your position on the next shot somebody who gets the book gets a good premium likes both of them is going to order more than somebody who gets a good

book um i choose premiums not very close to the subject the book is

you choose premiums that are quite close the subject the book is i don't know which is better they both seem to work enormously well uh again you have a problem

which is they sound a lot alike youth yours free youth pills um [Music] yours free how to banish wrinkles the

natural way again you're getting the premium you're getting into the problem premium overload and it's something you have to take in consideration uh you have to monitor your tests very

very closely and your results and your your polls and see if the danger you know things in mail order drop off not slowly but they usually they sometimes

plummet and that's what you've got to watch but i think premiums are i think if i absolutely am sold on premiums i wouldn't sell anything without a print

does that answer your question yeah okay good i didn't know okay thanks gene that's a pleasure um we have a small gift for you for coming

here oh my god premium it's not a piece of modern art it's a brass box with the rhodell logo that says jean schwartz and rydell press a winning team

[Applause]