17.01.2025
A man with a cigar
There’s a weird man standing outside the entrance to the office.
This is Sea Containers House in London.
He’s tanned, wearing a well-cut jacket and shirt, casual trousers.
He holds a match up to a cigar chomped between his teeth and lights it.
You can see it’s an expensive cigar.
The regular smokers standing outside shuffle away, outdone.
A few hours from now, this man will impact my life in a big way.
Right now, though, I’m wondering who the hell this geezer is.
…
Before you submit a piece of copy to anyone, there are three things—minimum—you should do.
I learned them a few hours after spotting this incongruous chap smoking a fat cigar outside my office in London.
You see, it turned out the guy was Mark Ford, a legend in the world of direct-response copywriting.
He was over from America to kick Agora’s UK writing team into shape.
I’d only just joined a week or so before, so all this was new to me.
Over the next couple of weeks Mark, and the great Bill Bonner, Agora’s founder, would teach me, and a load of the existing writers (copywriters and editors), everything they knew about how to write in a persuasive and engaging way.
Did it work?
I don’t know.
But if you’re still reading this, there’s a chance something rubbed off.
And today, I’ll pass on three pieces of advice they gave me all those years ago.
Advice they gave before even looking at the copy we submitted.
Yup.
You’d wander over to Mark with your piece and he’d just look up and say, it’s not ready yet.
“But…” you’d stutter, “you’ve not…”
“Delete 25% of it. Get it tighter.”
And so, you’d wander off and do as he said, running through the piece and deleting whatever you thought was unnecessary.
Of course, during this process, you’d realise there was a load of guff that was completely useless and didn’t serve the piece in any way.
Dammit, you’d think, how did he know? And off you’d trundle to resubmit.
Mark would open the piece on his laptop and check something called the FK score.
“It’s over 8,” he’d say. “You don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
Huh?
WTF is the FK score and what do you mean I don’t know what I’m trying to say, you’d wonder.
And then you’d realise he was right. You’d read the piece and there wasn’t one clear idea running through. You’d waffled for a fair while and kind of suggested two contradictory things at the end.
God dammit.
You’d go through the piece again. Make sure the thread ran tighter and there was one clear idea running through it and check the FK score again.
It was below 8. Hurrah.
Over to Mark again thinking this time he’ll actually read the thing.
But no.
“Have you read it aloud?” he’d ask.
What? No. Why would I read it—
“Read it aloud and then come back to me.”
And so, pride now completely shot, you print the piece off and read it aloud.
Who knows how many cigars the man smoked between you first attempting to submit the piece and him finally looking at the actual words, but damn if he wasn’t right…
Reading aloud the piece would reveal a whole other set of changes.
Finally, you’d submit it a fourth time, and he tells you it’s pretty good, a few minor tweaks here and there but generally pretty positive.
The magic, of course, is that he’d had me deeply edit my own work and vastly improve it WITHOUT reading a single word.
Madness, really.
But go through this process a few times and those checks start to become rote, you do them without thinking and eventually, you write cleaner and clearer, and you inherently have a single idea running through.
Indeed, on first draft, this piece has an FK score of 4.7, no passive sentences, and voila… here you are at the end of it, seeing the value of editing your copy in this way before submitting it to anyone.
Mic drop, as they say.