John Kuraoka, freelance advertising copywriter

www.kuraoka.com
(619) 465-6100
An advertising copywriter’s bookshelf: recommended books

For information useful to an advertising copywriter – and, for that matter, to anyone in advertising – here is a short list of books that I seem to pull out on a regular basis. In listing these books, I’ve deliberately neglected the traditional bibliographical format because I’m sure there are newer editions on bookseller’s shelves than on my own.

Advertising Technique:
Many of these are unashamedly old books, and yes, I do read current business best-sellers. It strikes me time and again that new books on marketing, advertising, and sales usually consist of old ideas, regurgitated in the latest techno/psycho-babble. If that proves anything, it’s that our tools have evolved more-rapidly than our selves. No matter how much the tools of advertising change, the thinking that makes it successful remains essentially the same.

Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible: a field guide to modern marketing
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising
John Lyons, Guts: advertising from the inside out
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore: The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy On Advertising
Al Ries & Jack Trout, Positioning: the battle for your mind
Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas, How To Advertise
Hank Seiden, Advertising Pure and Simple
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Business/Life Skills:
Advertising is a people business. That’s true whether you’re working face-to-face as part of a copywriter/art director team, or writing an ad that’ll be read, viewed, heard, or downloaded by millions. People are not persuaded en masse; they are persuaded (by the millions) one at a time.

Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People
George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
Herb Cohen, You Can Negotiate Anything
Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

Copywriting:
You’ll look a long time before you find a better, more-comprehensive collection of examples of powerful copywriting than any Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog from around 1900, when mail order was the Internet of the day, photo reproduction was expensive, and every sale hung on the copywriter’s skill. The language might be dated, but the copywriting is honed to a razor’s edge. That said, most advertising copywriting guidebooks boil down to the directives contained in these tightly written books.

Victor O. Schwab, How to Write A Good Advertisement
William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style

Creativity:
Every copywriter has good concept days and mediocre concept days. These books are what you need to turn a mediocre day into a good day.

Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head
Roger von Oech, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants

Life In Advertising:
Here’s some light reading for your next coffee break, each written by creative giants who were copywriters. The anecdotes contain valuable case studies.

Jerry Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Luke Sullivan, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

Periodicals:
Advertising trade publications are interesting for the gossip or the classifieds, but otherwise relatively useless to the advertising copywriter. Most news weeklies are useful for their studies of popular culture, but are nothing you’d archive. A subscription to Reader’s Digest, however, is essential to anyone in advertising. First and foremost, it’s a direct line to middle America, which wields the economic clout that drives most U.S. marketing efforts. Even if you’re niche marketing, you need to be aware of where the baseline lies. Second, it’s a quick read that includes a wide range of subjects (including the vocabulary-enriching Word Power feature). Third, the front cover remains one of the best living examples of headline writing. Fourth, it’s small, so you can keep a year’s worth stacked on the toilet tank. That’s handy when it’s August and you’re trying to get into the mood to write holiday ads.

Reference Books:
One thing about being an advertising copywriter: you never know when you’re going to need to learn something about, say, the habits of wildebeest. Despite the power of web search, it’s good to have some reference books at hand:

A dictionary. I love the American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, for its extensive usage notes, but any reasonably up-to-date collegiate dictionary should suffice.
A thesaurus. My new go-to is the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Second Edition. Roget’s Thesaurus in Dictionary Form and Rodale’s Synonym Finder are two classics.
Some sort of general but in-depth reference. I bought a second-hand set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica dirt cheap, and it’s often quicker for me to look things up by hand than on-line – and much easier to cross-reference subjects. The New York Public Library Desk Reference, The World Almanac, and The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, all of which I used to rely on as single-volume resources for quick look-ups, have been replaced by Wikipedia and the like. But there’s still nothing like a printed, multi-volume encyclopedia for cross-pollination of less obvious ideas.
Quotation collections. I have several because when you need quotations, you tend to need lots of them.
Timeline books. I have The Timetables of History and The Timetables of Science, along with similarly structured books covering other fields and interests. They offer a graphical sense of what happened when and what else was going on then. It’s that cross-pollination of ideas thing again.
A library card. In addition to carrying all kinds of reference materials, a library is a great resource for keeping up with the latest fiction, non-fiction, and periodicals – and, for browsing for ideas. The library also offers recent movies and a huge catalog of music for free. And, it makes it easy to read books you don’t want to be seen reading – you just borrow the Kindle version!

One last word.
Reading about advertising is fun. But creating advertising - exciting, effective advertising – is even more fun. That’s why I like being an advertising copywriter.

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John Kuraoka, freelance advertising copywriter

www.kuraoka.com (619) 465-6100 An advertising copywriter’s bookshelf: recommended books

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www.kuraoka.com
(619) 465-6100
An advertising copywriter’s bookshelf: recommended books