In Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously
Good Content, top marketing veteran Ann Handley gives expert
guidance and insight into the process and strategy of content creation,
production and publishing, with actionable, how-to advice designed to
get results. Because in a content-driven world, everyone is, in fact, a
writer.
“If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social
media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on
our words to carry our marketing messages,” explains Handley.
“In a time-challenged world dominated by short and snappy, by click-bait
headlines and Twitter streams and Instagram feeds and GIFs and video and
Snapchat and YOLO and LOL and #tbt. . . does the idea of focusing on
writing seem pedantic and ordinary? Actually, writing matters more now,
not less. Our online words are our emissaries; they tell the world who
we are.”
Handley explores how the lessons and rules of creating good content
apply across all of online assets —web pages, home page, landing pages,
blogs, email, marketing offers, and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and
other social media. Handley deconstructs the strategy and delivers a
practical approach to create ridiculously compelling and competent
content - whether a big brand or small and solo.
“Our writing can make us look smart or it can make us look stupid. It
can make us seem fun, or warm, or competent, or trustworthy. But it can
also make us seem humdrum or discombobulated or flat-out boring,”
Handley adds. “That means we’ve got to choose words well, and write with
economy and the style and honest empathy for our customers. And it means
you put a new value on an often-overlooked skill in content marketing:
How to write, and how to tell a true story really, really well.”
The book is separated into six sections; each deals with a different
dimension of content:
-
How to Write Better (and How to Hate Writing Less)—the latter
for the recovering or traumatized writer—offers some handy scaffolding
and blueprints for better thinking and writing.
-
Grammar and Usage discusses the stuff most people consider
writing. It gives readers some grammar rules and tools to help them
choose better words and craft better sentences and paragraphs . . . to
help them start flexing your content muscles.
-
Story Rules (Part 3) and Publishing Rules (Part 4). The first
provides some guidelines on elements that will infuse content with
heart and soul and integrity, and layer it with a warm blanket of
trust. There’s a lot to learn here from the ground rules of journalism
and publishing, so those are covered in the part that follows.
-
13 Things Marketers Write, which gives readers a super-tactical
look at typical marketing tasks.
-
Content Tools gives readers a reference list of resources and
paraphernalia to help them produce their best work.
Handley adds, “In our world, many hold a notion that the ability to
write, or write well, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few. Writing well
is considered a kind of art, linked murkily to muse and mysticism. That
leaves us thinking there are two kinds of people: the writing haves—and
the hapless, for whom writing well is a hopeless struggle, like trying
to carve marble with a butter knife.
“But I don’t believe that, and neither should you. The truth is this:
writing well is part habit, part knowledge of some fundamental rules,
and part giving a damn. We are all capable of producing good writing.
Or, at least, better writing!”
Contact the publicist:
Melissa Connors
Publicity Manager
mconnors@wiley.com
201-748-6834