Do You Really Want Readers? by Andy Scheer

Imagine if you had to condense your message to a dozen words — or only four or five.

That's not a hypothetical exercise. It's daily reality for writers engaging in marketing and promotions.

That fact struck home as I checked the email account my wife and I reserve for offers from various companies.

In their subject line, each company had to distill its core message to a single, easily understood phrase. Based on that handful of words, potential customers would decide whether to see more -- or hit delete.

A few samples from one day's screen:

If you matched the target demographic, which of these would you click?

Now consider your own marketing – whether emails to the people on your list or the titles and opening sentences of your blog posts. The brutal reality of attraction or dismissal applies to our work as authors.

People bombarded with messages won't keep reading until they finally come to the meat of yours. If your purpose isn't immediately clear – or it doesn't connect – you've lost that potential sale.

Few of us enjoy marketing – for good reason. Done well, it ranks among the most demanding writing we'll ever do. But it's also the most important.

To connect with busy, distracted readers, don't stick with the first words that come to mind. Craft your opening words with care: keeping an eye to your target audience, your central message, and how it connects with them. Otherwise, you likely won't connect.

A Word Fitly Spoken by Andy Scheer

I often hear the phrase “divine appointment” bandied at writers conferences, taking the narrow view of direct meetings between people.

But the past few days I've received several reminders that divine appointments also apply to interactions with what others have written. And not simply with writing that's supposed to be “spiritual.”

Even with writing in a free community newspaper.

When my granddaughter was less than a year old, her parents spied an article about child safety in The Woodmen Edition. It advised parents to speak out to inform the other when expecting them to watch the child. Ever since, “you've got the tot,” has been their frequent phrase.

Last evening, my daughter asked me how long I thought Juliet, now nearly three, would be “the tot.”

“Until she's a teen,” I said, “or at least a tween.”

This weekend I made for the several dozenth time a recipe for microwave scrambled eggs, prepared and cooked in a deep coffee mug. It's given my weekend mornings a far better start, and it's given my mother-in-law the satisfaction that she passed along a useful one-inch clipping from her community's give-away newspaper.

Perhaps someday the writer will produce cookbooks for a big New York House. Meanwhile I'm grateful she sent the recipe to a publisher in Arvada.

The amazing, divine aspect of putting something into print, whether online or to a more formal audience, is that you never know when or how those words will touch a life.

Today at lunch, I encountered in the pages of William Least Heat-Moon's travel book River Horse some amazing perspective for my upcoming cross-country trip with my father-in-law in his 1930 Ford.

But the words aren't his—except his decision to include them. They come from a page of advice to foreign motorists in Japan, creatively translated about the time my father-in-law's Model A was built:

When a passenger of the foot
hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet
to him melodiously at first.
If he still obstacles your passage,
tootle him with vigour
and express by word of the mouth
the warning “Hi, Hi!”

Beware the wandering horse
that he shall not take fright
as you pass him.
Do not explode
the exhaust box at him.
So soothingly by
or stop by the road-side
till he pass away.

Give big space
to the festive dog
that makes sport
in the road-way.
Avoid entanglement of dog
with your wheel-spokes.

Go soothingly on the grease-mud,
as there lurk the skid demon.
Press the brake of the foot
as you roll round the corners
to save the collapse
and tie-up.

Driving an antique car with wheel spokes, I'll remember to avoid entanglement with festive dogs – and to go soothingly on the grease-mud.

If I'd encountered those words a year ago, I'd likely have passed over them. But today, they pointed to yet another divine appointment.

What words in print have unexpectedly touched your life?