If you don’t have the following books in your personal library, stop reading this blog after this entry and order them online or go buy them.
Seriously. Without them, you may be making mistakes that drive your target audiences away (or up the wall)–NOT a good thing!
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
A Dictionary
A Thesaurus
The Chicago Manual of Style
Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale
The Copywriter’s Handbook Robert W. Bly
The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott
Web Copy that Sells by Maria Veloso
Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen
Net Words by Nick Usborne
I have an entire library of books about writing but if my house caught on fire, the above titles are the ones I’d grab if I had time (after rescuing people and pets, of course).
To be an always-improving writer, you need to always be writing. Writing needs to become such a habit that you have withdrawal symptoms when you can’t indulge.
Until you have at least 10,000 hours of writing under your fingertips, you’re still an apprentice (and you’re never completely “finished” learning to write better).
Good writing, like everything else that is acquired and worth doing, takes time.
Unless you love it, it’ll be a tedious chore. Because it’s going to bedevil you for a long time until you finally “catch” how to make it memorable, magical and magnetic.
