Acknowledgments
Firstly, I would like to thank Lu for all the support she gave me over the years as I pursued my copywriting career, and for giving me the idea to draw on my copywriting experiences to write a textbook. Also, I would like to thank both John Boardman at Milestone Seminars and Alison Barnes and Rob Harland at Nottingham Trent University’s design school for letting me develop and fine-tune my teaching material with real, live audiences.
It’s not until you begin to teach others that you start to realize the full challenges and intricacies of your discipline, and it is my work training and developing the copywriters at Jupiter Design over 15 years that is the primary source of this book. I am proud to have provided the environment and opportunity that has produced a number of professional copywriters, and thank each of them for helping me to develop my own skills further in the process. (I’m still trying to work out how most of them ended up marrying each other.)
Helen Evans at Laurence King helped turn my concept into a publishable proposal, and John Jervis has shown incredible patience and support in pulling the rough text together, pushing me to perfect it, and looking after the design, which has been expertly created by Jessie Earle, of Studio Ten And A Half. Under the guidance of Pentagram’s Angus Hyland, Jessie has brought my text to life and moved it into completely new dimensions.
Some key individuals set me off in the right directions at the start. Richard Eisermann at Prospect was invaluable, and Clive Grinyer was very helpful too. The others who have been absolutely essential to the content include Steve Brown at the American Medical Association, Catherine Toole at Sticky Content, Simon Jones at Ink, John Simmons and Rob Mitchell at The Writer, Lynda Relph-Knight at Design Week, Vince Verdooren in Chicago, Jon Turner at Boots, Siobhann Carolan at Ogilvy, Julie Oxberry at Household, Andrew Mills at Experian, Simon Hargraves at Pret A Manger, and not least Lorna Milligan and our colleagues at Jupiter Design.
A co-credit could go to Tim Shaw for his painstaking efforts to research and collect all of the imagery, but as he’s my brother I can get away with taking all the glory for myself. Without Tim this book would be text-only, and I would be a cabbage (a lot of our material didn’t make it into print, but whenever we lost a chance to publish something good, we seemed to find a better solution).
The 24 writers I interviewed have been wonderful to talk to, without exception. A special mention has to go out to Steve Manning of Igor International – how are the mermaids? I am biased, but writers, and copywriters in particular, are my favorite people. I hope you can tell from the articles that these lively people are thinkers who are full of fun, ideas, and insights, and I must give the biggest thanks to each of them, because they have contributed variety, contrast, and unique experience to these pages.
Lastly, I must thank my kids Leilah, Sam, and Fin, and apologize to them too. It must be my fault that they seem to speak concisely, precisely, and with a great deal of persuasion, so that my copy skills are coming back to haunt me.