This post was originally an email sent out to subscribers of Spice up your life, my weekly email.
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Bernard Cornwell is a hero of mine.
He wrote the Sharpe series, bringing to life a fascinating period in British history. It became a TV series, in which we got to see Sean Bean, another hero of mine, calling lots of people a bastard in the most glorious way.
Cigars and red wine seem to make up at least 40% of Cornwell’s diet, and he emits an air of generally not giving a shit.
He also wrote the Saxon Stories, which I haven’t read, but its TV adaptation, The Last Kingdom, is quite possibly my favourite show of all time.
Cornwell makes a cameo where he gets his throat slashed by the hero. If a grisly death in an adaptation of your own work is not ‘making it’ as an author, I don’t know what is.
He’s wildly successful. He’s written over 60 novels, selling over 30 million copies and is worth tens of millions of pounds.
And the way he did it was simple – he copied others.
It’s not difficult, he says. All he did to learn the skills was shamelessly rip off existing historical fiction he enjoyed (CS Forester’s Hornblower series, if you were wondering).
“I literally broke each one down, marking their structure on big, coloured charts. I noted down where there was action, where there was flashback, where there was romance and so on.”
He achieved greatness by taking something already out there and putting his own spin on it.
This approach is exactly what you should do if you want to start writing better marketing comms for your business.
Just to be clear, it’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is where you take people’s specific words and ideas.
But structures, techniques and overarching concepts are universal. They don’t belong to anyone. And imitating them is a great way to start.
Because if you don’t have to worry about the underlying structures and techniques, you can put more time and thought into the specific ideas and language that brings your writing to life.
So, here’s what you can do…
Think about companies or people whose comms you love and/or know are performing well. Pay attention to whenever a piece makes you stop and think or strikes a nerve. Save any examples.
Then, analyse them. Break them down. Work out how they’re structured. Look at what each section or element achieves and how it links together.
When you do that, you end up with a guideline or template you can use again and again, just changing the specific details.
You can do this for everything – web pages, social posts, blog posts, emails, ads, white papers and more.
Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking.
‘I don’t have the time to do all that. I can’t be arsed plotting details down on massive pieces of coloured paper like Bernard Cornwell.’
Well, here’s a dirty little secret…
You can get AI to do it for you.
Yep, unlike all the amateurs using AI to churn out their (invariably crap) marketing comms, flip it around.
Get AI to do what it’s actually good at – rapidly analyse massive piles of data and extract something useful.
Copy the text from websites you love and get AI to tell you about the underlying structures, the techniques it uses to capture attention and provoke emotional responses.
You can even get it to create templates, which can be really helpful if you struggle with the blank page.
Again, this isn’t plagiarism. You’re not stealing people’s specific words and ideas, but structures and techniques that are universal.
If this approach is good enough to help Bernard Cornwell write beloved and bestselling novels, it’s good enough for us little business owners to write copy.
If you need help with any of that, just drop me a line.