MarkFord.net

February 5, 2019 No Comments

If your number one goal in life is getting rich, becoming an author is not a great choice of occupation. The average writer in the USA, according to ZipRecruiter, is $39,179.

To put that in perspective, it’s about $5,000 more than the average income of a garbage collector, but about $12,000 less than the average plumber.

But there are exceptions. And, as my brother-in-law George reminds me every time he visits, it’s always the exception that is interesting.

George likes to start his day with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. He has a curious mind, and he likes to share bits of trivia that he picks up from whatever it is that he’s reading at the moment. So when he’s visiting and we are at the breakfast table, it’s not unusual for him to ask a question that might otherwise seem to have come from the blue.

Today, it was this one: “Who is the author who is worth more than a billion dollars even after giving away $170 million in 2012?”

Now before you throw out the obvious answer, tell me this:

Do you know who Paulo Coelho is?

He’s a Brazilian novelist, musician, and theater director. His first book, published in 1982, had only modest success. But then he took a trip around Spain and chronicled it in The Pilgrimage. And he followed that up with The Alchemist, which was not only a huge international bestseller but the most translated book by a living author. With a net worth topping $500 million, Coelho is near the top of the world’s richest authors.

What about Barbara Taylor Bradford? Do you know who she is?

I’m not familiar with anything she’s written, but I understand that A Woman of Substance, her debut novel (at the age of 46) has sold 35 million copies since it was published in 1979. In addition to 28 additional novels (all bestsellers), Bradford has authored a series of children’s books and a series of interior design books. She’s worth about $300 million.

Or how about Jeffrey Archer?

This English author (and politician) has sold more than 250 million copies of his books internationally. Part of his fame, I have read, came from the fact that he spent 5 years in prison on some charge of “perjury and perverting the court of justice,” which he monetized by writing a series of diaries about the experience. Archer has a net worth of $200 million.

Now – unless you are a student of African literature – I’m almost positive you’ve never heard of David Oyedepo.

A Nigerian author of inspirational books, Oyedepo is his country’s richest cleric. He’s written more than 50 books of his own, and also owns Dominion Publishing House, which publishes faith-based works by other writers. Oyedepo’s net worth is estimated to be about $150 million.

Coelho, Bradford, Archer, and Oyedepo – these super-rich but little known (to the likes of you and me) writers are high up on the net worth totem pole. But most of the spaces at the top are filled by names we know very well:

You know John Grisham…

He has a net worth of $300 million, and he earns an average of $50 million a year – in part because his books are tailor-made to be produced as movies. I’d expect to see him steadily moving up the net-worth list.

And Danielle Steel…

Steel has, without a doubt, the most colorful marital history of her peers. Following a divorce from her wealthy first husband, she had a short marriage to a man who was later convicted of rape, followed by an equally short marriage to a drug addict. And that wasn’t the end of it. She’s been married and divorced at least two more times. Meanwhile, she has written more than 70 bestselling novels… and has a net worth of $385 million.

And Stephen King…

A specialist in the literary genres of horror, fantasy, and suspense, King has written beautifully and successfully for films, too. (He has also written a great book on writing called On Writing.)He has sold more than 350 million copies of his novels around the globe, and has a net worth of more than $400 million.

And James Patterson (who is almost – but not quite – our winner)…

Patterson has sold more than 300 million copies of his books. Most notable is his series featuring Alex Cross, a fictional psychologist and crime solver. He is also known for his campaign to make reading a national priority, and for his support of colleges and universities, school libraries, and independent bookstores. (He has donated millions in grants and scholarships.) Patterson has a net worth of $750 million, and continues to earn about $90 million per year.

So who is the richest author in the world? JK Rowling, of course!

Was Rowling your guess? She was mine. How could she not be?

She is the author of the Harry Potter industry, which began with books and then went on to include movies, games, merchandise, endorsements, and even a 2-part Broadway play. With a net worth of more than $1 billion – even after giving away $170 million of it in 2012 – Rowling currently holds the title. READ MORE

From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Learning, Practicing, and Understanding

December 21, 2018 No Comments

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Delray Beach, FL.- What’s going to be on your list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2019? Do you want to become a masterful writer? Marketer? CEO?

Whatever your goal is, know this: There are four stages in mastering a complex skill: learning, practicing, and understanding.

The first two are intertwined. The last is an achievement.

You cannot practice without some little bit of learning. And you cannot learn without a lot of practice. But the understanding… oh, that’s the wonder!

Let me explain.

For some time now, I’ve been mentoring three young people in the financially valuable skill of writing advertising copy.

Each week, they bring in some piece of copy for me to critique. These are not long pieces. Nor are they complete. They are early drafts of what we call “leads” – headlines and the first 300 to 700 words of copy.

When mentoring copywriters, I like working with leads because they are short and yet they provoke the most important questions about advertising:

For example:

* Does the headline work? Does it hook my attention? Does it make me want to read on with positive expectations?

* Does the rest of the lead introduce an emotionally compelling promise or idea? Does that promise or idea meet the prospect where he is at the moment of reading? Does it build from there? Does it leave the prospect desperate for more?

* What type of lead is being used? A story lead? A secret lead? A promise? An offer? If it is a secret lead, is it followed by a story? If a story leads, is a secret introduced?

The other advantage of using leads for teaching copy is that if their leads are flawed (as they often are), the flaws will typically be the most common mistakes junior copywriters make.

For example:

* Mistaking topics for ideas

* Breaking “the rule of one” – i.e., presenting multiple ideas or making multiple promises

* Making claims without proof

* Writing copy that is generalized and/or vague

I’ve been using this teaching format for decades, and it’s usually good and useful. Smart, hardworking students generally make fast progress. I’m sure there are other ways to teach and learn that are as good or better for individuals. But for me, this is a protocol that has proven to be effective for most people most of the time.

One thing that has surprised me is that there is little to no relationship between a person’s ability to understand a writing principle and his/her ability to put that principle to work.

In fact, I’ve been confounded by how often, after, for example, explaining how a particular headline isn’t working, I will get the same mistake the very next day. And the day after that. And so on.

When I first noticed this many years ago, I assumed the fault was mine. That I had not explained the principle clearly. But repeated and even variant explanations of the same principle did no good.

So was it the student? Was it his fault?

From My Work-in-Progress Basket

How Never to Begin a Blog Post, or… The Most Important Secret of Storytelling

November 11, 2018 No Comments

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Delray Beach, Florida.- Should I tell him? Will he listen? Will he feel I’m butting in?

I had just read a company blog post from a colleague. It was an important post. And he was making an important point. I wanted every employee to read it.

But the problem… well…

One of the best ways to begin a blog post (or a speech or an essay) is with a story.

A well-told story will instantly grab the reader’s attention and hold him tight while he discovers (indirectly and without resistance) the idea you want to convey.

This is true only of well-told stories. Badly told stories are perhaps the worst way to begin.

So what is the difference between a well-told and a badly told story?

There are about a dozen. But the first and most important – by far – is that a well-told story begins in the middle.

The above-mentioned blog post began like this:

I first met David and his wife Jenny in Panama in 2007.

David was from upstate New York but moved to Philadelphia shortly after marrying Jenny over 30 years ago. Other than a business trip to Toronto, he had never been out of the country before.

They were both attending International Living’s “Ultimate Event,” which I was helping run. This was our monster event, gathering all our country experts in one place to help the hundreds of attendees figure out the best places to retire or invest overseas.

We got to chatting over a drink at the welcome cocktail reception, and I soon discovered they were nearing retirement and wanted to know the best country to move to…

I’m reading it and I’m wondering, “Where is this going?”

If it had been written by someone else, someone I didn’t know, I’d have already put it down. But since it was a colleague and since I knew he wanted to improve his writing skills, I continued reading. And reading. And reading. And wondering when he would get to the point!

Six or seven hundred words later, he wrote:

Knowing your customers is extremely important and seems so obvious….It can help you develop your products and services and craft the right messages to appeal to those customers. It provides a sense of empathy…

Wow! What a long and winding way to get to this idea.

I wrote him this note:

“If you are going to tell a story, begin in the middle, which usually means in the middle of the conflict. (Aristotle called it in medias res.) Give the reader a reason to want to keep reading.

“This is a story meant to illustrate a point you are making about the usefulness of attending live events. So you need to create some conflict around that. You want the reader to know what’s at stake. So he’ll care about it.

“Does this make sense?”

And then I thought I should give him an example of what I meant. I came up with this:

She told me he never attends industry events – especially those where you’re expected to “mingle” with potential customers.

“I’m running a big business,” she said proudly. “I’ve got deadlines to meet. I’ve got a bottom line worry about. I don’t have time to waste on cocktail parties, making small talk with customers.”

She seemed very sure of herself and I was her guest so I didn’t want to argue with her. Instead, I put on a sympathetic, non-committal face.

When, three years later, her business failed, I was not surprised…

I was hoping he would see how much stronger this is. Not because I’m a better writer. I’m not. But stronger because of the way I started my story.

I didn’t start at the dull beginning with preliminary information the reader might eventually want or need to know. I started with the conflict – in this case, with the protagonist being challenged by a woman making a statement he knows is wrong.

When you begin your story at a scene that represents a core conflict, you accomplish two things:

* You allow your reader to get to the point faster. (In this case, in 90 words rather than 600.) And…

* Even more importantly, you let the reader experience the truth of your idea emotionally before you give him the argument for it rationally.

And did my critique work?

He didn’t respond immediately, so I was a little worried. But the next morning, I received a friendly thank-you. “I’m not going to read Aristotle,” he said. “But, yes, I can see how much stronger it is to begin in medias res.”

Miscellaneous Essays

April 16, 2018 No Comments

I am sometimes asked – and I don’t know why – what course of study I recommend for college students wishing to become successful in business. My answer usually provokes skepticism if not scorn. I recommend liberal arts.

In the age of the Internet and the new economy, specialized technical knowledge is revered. Most of those who ask my opinion figure I’m going to say something like “computer programming” or “communications engineering.” In fact, I think that type of education is the least likely to put you at the top of your field – either as an entrepreneur or as a corporate climber.

There are several reasons.

First, technical knowledge is temporary. The trendier the technology, the faster it changes. What you learn now will become less true as time goes on. Eventually, it will be obsolete.

Plus, technical majors take a lot of time. The typical engineering student – if he aims to get into a good graduate school – must use up most if not all of his credits on subjects that only a fellow techie would even begin to understand. All that specialization leaves little time for “softer” skills like reading, writing, and thinking. And virtually no time for hanging around and having fun.

But the main reason I advise against a technical major is that technical workers have secondary roles in business. In How to Become CEO, Jeffrey Fox distinguishes between “staff jobs” (which make a business work) and “line jobs” (which make a business profitable). He says that in most companies “most of the people are either in administration or field sales. Administrative people are not bad, or untalented, but they are not on the cutting edge. The company doesn’t depend on them.”

I made this point to FS just the other day. He had the idea that he would “do better” in business if he majored in computer sciences or some such “high-tech” major – even though he didn’t especially like that course of study.

From what I’ve seen in business, I told him, staff people (and I’d include all technical people in this category) are unfairly but often viewed as:

Temporary: You need them only as long as you need technical know-how.
Expensive: Because they fall onto the “expense” side of the P&L, keeping their compensation low seems to make good fiscal sense.
Expendable: When sales slow down, all expenses are trimmed – including salaries for staff employees.

Good line employees, on the other hand, are seen as:

Necessary: They create the sales, and sales are always needed.
Worthwhile: Since most line positions are compensated at least partly on the basis of performance, the usual attitude is “The more we pay you, the more valuable you are.”
Irreplaceable: People who create sales have a secret power that the company does not want to lose to its competition. Again, the more money you make, the more irreplaceable you become.

Now let’s look at the other side. What’s so good about liberal arts?

A liberal arts education teaches you three skills: to think well, to write well, and to speak well. And in the corporate world – and in the entrepreneurial world as well – wealth is created by analyzing problems, figuring out solutions, and selling those solutions. In other words, a liberal arts education is tailor-made to give you the skills you need to succeed in business. And not just to do well. I’m talking about going all the way to the top.

Businesses have one fundamental problem that presents itself endlessly in different disguises: how to sell products/services profitably. There are many, many solutions to this problem. Even in a specific situation on a specific day, there is always more than one. And the person who can regularly come up with solutions – and convince others that his solutions should be implemented – is the person who is going to get the rewards. The money. The power. The prestige.

Yes, you can improve your thinking, writing, and speaking skills while enrolled in a technical curriculum. But it will happen indirectly and additionally. It won’t be what you are mainly concerned with. With a liberal arts education, you ensure that you will spend most of your time learning and practicing the very skills you will use later to get your ideas and solutions sold.

I’m not criticizing technical people. They are very valuable. I’m simply saying that if your goal is to get to the top of any organization, public or private, you need to be a very good thinker, writer, and speaker. And a liberal arts education is designed to help you with that.

I’ve known very successful business leaders that did not have a liberal arts education. The CEO of Agora, a billion-dollar company I consult with, is one. He was educated in accounting and worked his way up to CFO. But he was smart enough to see that he had reached the end of that line. So he gradually moved his way into discussions about marketing and sales and product development. Eventually, he became a very good thinker and speaker on these issues. And when it came time to appoint a new CEO, he was the logical choice.

From My Work-in-Progress Basket

One Thing & Another

March 24, 2018 No Comments

Word for the Wise

Claque (KLAK) – a group hired to applaud; a group of sycophants. Example as used by Charles P. Pierce in an Esquire article titled “Nobody Knows How to Play This Game Anymore”: “The bill passed the House because the Freedom Caucus, that claque of unreconstructed extremists who hold the balance of power there, gave in a little.”

Did You Know…?

Cats spend 66% of their lives sleeping.

From My “Work-in-Progress” Basket

Principles of Wealth: #10 of 61

Wealth is neither absolute nor objective. This is so because those things that we value are by nature relative and subjective.

Your Richard Mille watch cost you $35,000 when you bought it 10 years ago, when the company first came into the public view. It worked no better than a $35 Casio. In fact, it worked considerably worse. You had to have it repaired twice and were charged several thousand dollars to do so. If the value you attached to your watch was pragmatic – keeping time and cost of use over 10 years – you’d feel the money you spent was a hugely foolish mistake.

But the company poured millions into advertising and became a status symbol, particularly among wealthy athletes and rap stars. It also raised its prices considerably. The current range is $250,000 and upwards.

Now you are told you can sell your “vintage, first edition” Richard Mille on the secondary market and walk away with $85,000 in cold cash.

Will you do it? That depends on how much you value its objective qualities of reliability and cost of use versus the subjective qualities of beauty, complexity, and prestige.

He Did What?

Although I haven’t written much advertising these past 20 years, I did more than a bit of it for a 10-year stretch during the 1980s. After that, I coached and mentored copywriters, and between 2000 and 2010 wrote a few books on the subject.

Writing persuasive copy was probably the single strongest money-making skill I had back then. And it accounted for the lion’s share of my earnings. But I was always a little embarrassed to admit that it was my primary job. Today, copywriters are looked upon much like actors were during Elizabethan times: otherwise reproachable lowlifes in possession of commercially valuable talents and abilities.

I do remember when, besieged by such opinion, I look refuge in remembering that one of my favorite writers, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) spent many early years writing copy to make ends meet. And he wasn’t the only one.

Here are some other respectable (and in some cases venerated) folks that worked as copywriters before achieving fame in a non-advertising career:

* Sherwood Anderson, author

* Helen Gurley Brown, former publisher and editor (Cosmopolitan)

* Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End

* Don DeLillo, author

* F. Scott Fitzgerald, author

* Terry Gilliam, director and animator

* Alec Guinness, actor

* Dashiell Hammett, author

* Hugh Hefner, publisher (Playboy)

* Joseph Heller, author

* Tim Kazurinsky, comedian

* Rick Moranis, actor

* Ogden Nash, poet

* Bob Newhart, comedian and actor

* Salmon Rushdie, author

* Dorothy L. Sayers, author

* Fay Weldon, author

Look at This…

https://www.youtube.com/watch

Miscellaneous Essays

How to Become What You Want to Be

July 10, 2013 No Comments

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

I was 16 years old when my father said those kind-and-cruel words to me. I never forgot them.

The first time I can remember wanting to be a writer, I was 11 or 12 years old. I’d written a poem for Sister Mary Something at school. My rhyming quatrain (AABB) was titled, pretentiously, “How Do I Know the World Is Real?”

I was at the kitchen table when my father started reading it over my shoulder. I felt anxious. My father was a credentialed writer, an award-winning playwright, a Shakespearean scholar, and a teacher of literature, including poetry. I’d seen him, on Saturday mornings, hunched over student essays, muttering and occasionally reading out loud passages to my mother that sounded perfectly good to me but elicited derisive laughter from them.

My father understood the secret-to-me clues of good writing. I didn’t feel at all comfortable having my fragile young poem exposed to the awesome danger of his critical mind. So there I sat, hoping he would go away. But he didn’t. I felt his hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm. “You may have a talent for writing,” he said.

I wrote lots of poetry in the months that followed, and began to think of myself as a writer. I liked that feeling. But soon other interests – touch football, the Junior Police Club, girls – crowded themselves into my life. Gradually, I wrote less and less. I still yearned to be a writer and so I began to feel guilty about not writing.

To assuage my guilt, I promised myself that my other activities were “life experience,” and that I needed life experience to become the good writer I wanted to be. In developing this excuse for not writing, I was building a structure of self-deception that many people live inside when they abandon their dreams. From the outside, it looks like you are doing nothing. But from the inside, you know that you are in the process of becoming, which, you convince yourself, is the next best thing to being.
That was the shape of my delusion when my father said, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write. A writer is someone who writes.”

So many people live their lives failing to become what they want to be because they can’t find the time to get started. How many times have you heard someone say that, one day, they will do what they always wanted to do – travel the world or paint paintings or write a book? And when you hear sentiments like those, what do you feel? Happy because you are confident that one day they will accomplish their long-held goal? Or sort of sad for them because you are pretty sure they never will?

And what about you? What is it that you want to be but haven’t become? What goal or project or task do you keep talking about accomplishing yet never do?

When my father told me that “writers write,” he was saying two things:

I had lost the right to call myself a writer when I stopped writing.
I could regain the title the moment I started writing again.

If you spend a while ruminating on this, you may find it both disturbing and liberating.

Miscellaneous Briefs

Unfinished Business

May 21, 2013 No Comments

I have a library of at least a thousand books, a third of which I have never read. I’d like to. I also have twenty years’ worth of memos I’ve written that I’d like to re-read.

I have always fancied that I’d spend the last five or ten years of my life seated comfortably in a chair across from the ocean, catching up on all that reading.

I’m not sure I’ll actually do this since I am habituated to more active intellectual challenges, such as running businesses and writing. But the idea appeals to me.

There could be worse ways to fade out of the picture.

Miscellaneous Essays

K.I.S.S.

July 5, 2012 No Comments

I had the feeling that Steve didn’t believe me. But I had no idea he would go behind my back to try to prove me wrong.

It was the spring of 1999. Steve had recently been hired by my client to write an investment newsletter. He had the qualifications: an MBA and Ph.D. from good schools, experience both in the front and back rooms of brokerages. But he didn’t want to sell stocks. He wanted to write about them.

When I saw his first effort I was impressed. The analysis was sound. The research was deep. There was only one problem. His writing was terrible.

It wasn’t sloppy or illogical or even ungrammatical. But it was incomprehensible. It read like a treatise. It was the kind of writing that you might get away with in academia but could never pull off in the real world.

I called him into my office and told him about my secret antidote for writing like his: the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The FK is a computerized tool that looks at the length of your sentences, how many syllables there are in each word, and other data. It then rates the entire piece in terms of reading ease. A rating of 5.0 or below is very easy to read. A rating of 10.0 or above is very difficult to read. A score between 5.0 and 10.0 is what you’ll find in most newspapers and magazines.

I explained to Steve that my goal is to keep my writing – no matter how complicated the ideas I’m trying to express – at 7.5 or below.

Then we analyzed Steve’s writing. It had an FK of 12.0. Almost off the chart.

“You won’t get a big audience with such a high FK score,” I said. “You have to work on simplifying your writing. Get your FK down to 7.5. You’ll be a better writer, have more readers, and make more money.”

He thanked me for the advice. But, as I said, I could tell he didn’t believe me. What I didn’t find out until years later was that he spent almost two months trying to disprove what I’d told him.

Miscellaneous Essays

My Office

January 20, 2012 No Comments

Like many male writers of my vintage, one of my literary heroes is Ernest Hemingway. Not just because I loved his stories and admired his prose but also because of the large, masculine way he lived his life. I liked the skiing and the sailing and the fishing and the boxing and the hunting and the bullfighting and the drinking and I even liked the fact that he shot himself when his end was inevitable.