Yes, You CAN Build a Super-Profitable Copywriting Business!
PART II
By Clayton Makepeace
- How to negotiate the same royalty rates the big dogs get ...
- How to find clients even when you have no real-world samples to show …
- The 6-step strategy I used to fill my dance card with high-paying clients …
- How to get paid to create an impressive portfolio …
- When accepting a $50/M royalty is a DUMB idea …
- How to create a world-class swipe file for a song …
- 4 best places to look for high-paying clients ...
- The #1 business blunder new copywriters make ...
- And MUCH MORE!
I promised I’d give you the rest of the interview Bob Bly did with me on the subject of building a profitable copywriting business …
… And here it is!
Bob Bly: How would you suggest a new copywriter charge for his or her services?
Clayton Makepeace: Well, if I were beginning today, I would probably begin with an advance plus royalty arrangement. I would probably start out asking for something in the range of a $12,000 to $15,000 advance against a royalty. And I would ask for the same royalty rate they pay their top writers.
Now the advance may be negotiable – years ago, I accepted jobs for far less than twelve to fifteen grand. But in all fairness, the royalty rate should not be different from writer to writer.
There are some clients out there who will say, “We don’t pay our top royalty rate for new writers.”
Sorry -- but that’s just specious. If your copy beats their control, you deserve the same royalty the control-writer got. And if it doesn’t win, your royalty rate is immaterial because the client won’t have to pay it.
Bob Bly: Interesting way to present that.
Clayton Makepeace: Some marketing or creative directors will say -- and this was actually said to me the other day by a good friend, who’s a marketing director – “But new writers aren’t consistent, so we pay the higher royalties to experienced writers and writers that we have a track record with, because we know we have a higher percent chance of getting a control when we work with that person.”
Again, it’s a totally specious argument. If you’re worried about consistency – if you want to mitigate the risk of working with an unknown writer -- cut the advance to the bone. That’s your hard cost anyway! But fair is fair – and if a new writer trashes your precious control, he or she deserves the same royalty the big dogs get.
When someone tells you that the customer you generate doesn’t have the same value to that company as the customer that
Gary Bencivenga or I or Jim Rutz or
Arthur Johnson generate, I’m sorry, he’s just horse-trading. He doesn’t believe it, either.
Bob Bly: Earlier, you used the phrase “copy chief” – for the sake of less experienced readers, could you define it for us?
Clayton Makepeace: A copy chief is simply somebody -- a mentor, an A-level writer, or a marketing director at a client company -- who agrees to work with you to develop the theme, the headline, the organization and the copy. Their job is to work with you to make the package more successful.
In short, a copy chief critiques each draft -- we call it “critting.”
Dan Rosenthal, for example, is the most famous critter in the universe. The guy is brutal. He takes a sadistic joy in absolutely eviscerating copy and beating copywriters bloody. In fact, his e-mail address is “CopyOgre.”
Now, if you ask an A-level writer or a coach to crit your copy, he or she will typically take a portion of the advance and a portion of the royalty. And depending on your experience level, that portion could be substantial.
Bob Bly: So what’s the best way for someone who is a beginner and doesn’t have a big track record and hasn’t written a lot of promotions to find a copy chief?
Let’s say you wanted to get into the newsletter field and you haven’t worked for a newsletter publisher before. Is your best bet to go find an A-level writer and apprentice under him? Or is it to do as you said, to pick a product from a major publisher, write a package, and show it to them?
Clayton Makepeace: I really think it’s all of the above. It’s like deep-sea fishing. You’ve got to have a lot of lines in the water.
When I launched my freelance career back in the 1970s, I had a six-step program for getting my name out there and finding new clients:
Here’s how I used to do it …
First, I’d pick my targets carefully. I created a mailing list of 400 prospective clients.
Since I was focusing on self-help publishers, I picked all the biggest companies – firms I already knew about – Phillips, KCI, Agora, Boardroom, The Ruff Times and others -- and used the Oxbridge Directory to select the rest.
If I knew the name of the person in the organization who hired writers, I included that in each address on my list. If I didn’t, I called 100 organizations per week and said, “I need to send a letter to the person there responsible for creating your direct mail promotions. Could you please tell me who that is?”
Second, I would get their attention. I wrote a short, one-page personalized letter saying...
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