The Copywriter Underground

Because people are endlessly fascinated about… themselves, the Typealizer writing/personality analysis site is a sure bet to score among the blogging set.

What’s it do? Simple.

You enter a blog URL, it analyzes the writing, then delivers a verdict about the personality type doing the writing.

The Copywriter Underground? I fell into the “Scientists” category, which suggests I’m a long-range, individualistic type who has little trouble working alone:

They left “devilishly handsome and adorably impish” out of their analysis, but then, I suppose they’d have to analyze the photograph on my blog to correctly arrive at that conclusion.

They did, however, provide an interesting diagram that showcased the parts of my brain that Were Presumably Used in the Creation of This Post:

Sure, the site returns a verdict in a suspiciously short time - short enough that I’m left to wonder exactly what it’s analyzing - but like most of you, I just can’t get enough of myself.

Just to spread the pain wealth around, I ran a couple other sites through the Typealizer.

Veteran Copy Pro Roberta Rosenberg’s blog yielded this result (we offer no comments about the image of a woman boozing it up):

Interestingly, my Trout Underground fly fishing blog returned the same personality type that Ms. Rosenberg enjoyed (which is odd considering it’s written by the same personality), while Copyblogger Brian Clark’s blog returned a seemingly off-target “Duty Fulfiller” verdict, which includes the passage suggesting

“They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.“

Not content to leave well enough alone, we threw a photo-heavy, writing-light “bikini” blog at Typealizer (selected entirely at random from the hundreds of bikini blogs that we don’t visit daily), which decided the barely clothed site featured a “Socializer” personality:

“The social and opiniated type. They are especially attuned to the feelings of themselves and others. They tend to be very aware of the values of their peer-group and tend to see things as either right or wrong, good or bad. They tend to be traditional and value their friends and family the most.”

I know when I visit a soft-core pornography bikini blog site, “traditional” values don’t exactly leap to mind, but let’s give Typealyzer a break and assume it was having an off day.

Is Typealizer a spot-on analysis tool destined to help you avoid hours of expensive psychotherapy? Not hardly.

It is, however, yet another way to waste a few minutes online - the Internet’s true Killer App.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

In my prior post, the concept of writer’s market oversaturation found a little traction, and today, I’m here to discuss the Biggest Menace Facing Copywriters Ever (So Far This Week):

Sleepwriting (or Zzz-mailing if our wacky group of sleep experts are to be believed).

Will you write your best copy with your eyes closed?

The UK Telegraph reports on this sinister new trend, which threatens the very foundations of the copywriting industry should certain mutant genetically gifted writers learn to craft hard-selling sentences in their sleep:

The 44-year-old woman, whose case is reported by researchers from the University of Toledo in the latest edition of medical journal Sleep Medicine, had gone to bed at around 10pm, but got up two hours later and walked to the next room.

She then turned on the computer, connected to the Internet, and logged on by typing her username and password to her email account. She then composed and sent three emails.

Each was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, not well formatted and written in strange language.

One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm,. Bring wine and caviar only.”

Another said simply, “What the…….”

The new variation of sleepwalking has been described as “zzz-mailing”.

Imagine competing with a zombie writer who pounds out a white paper and two landing pages while you’re unproductively snoring away, blissfully unaware your clients (and your revenue stream) were finding a new home at the “dreamwriters.com” freelance bidding site.

The implications are clear; it’s not enough to be productive 14 hours a day, scheduling ourselves to the second, generating free content by the bushel and incurring raging carpal tunnel.

No, tomorrow’s competitive copywriter has to text high-conversion-rate landing page copy to clients while sugar plums dance in our heads, and those incapable of “sleepwriting” will be branded slackers, or worse - hopelessly old fashioned .

Simply put, Undergrounders, I’ve seen the future of copywriting, and it’s dark out.

More on this breaking news story - as soon I’ve achieved productive REM sleep.

Keep sleepwriting, Tom Chandler.

A New York Times Book Review essay latches onto Bailoutmania with a humor piece focused on a mythical writer’s bailout, and like most humor, brushes up against a few bruised areas along the way. Still, it’s a humor piece, so we’ll start with writer Paul Greenberg’s lead joke:

A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:

Woman: What do you do?

Man: Me? Oh, I write books.

Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?

Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.

A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.

The rest of the wittily written piece similarly amuses, though like most humor, the knife cuts close to home, including in this graph about “overcapacity” in the writing universe - a real (if little talked about) issue, even in copywriting:

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

It’s not true that everyone who can type claims writerhood, but a quick survey of the many writer’s forums, sites and blogs suggests significant growth in the writer population, and not always among those capable of adding to the craft.

In many ways, the copywriter’s recession began years ago if downward trends in fees paid for lower-end projects are any indication.

While Greenburg’s essay is generally hilarious - his farm-billish plan to subsidize half the working writers to not write is golden - he taps into a larger populist resentment about the financial and car company bailouts, where greed and failure are simultaneously reviled and rewarded by the same congress.

We’re at the tail end of a period where no corporate subsidy seemed too big or too outrageous - and find ourselves in the midst of a financial meltdown where “too big to fail” leaves individual workers clutching an empty bag and a large debt about to come due. Populist resentment isn’t just to be expected, it’s probably demanded (at least that’s my understanding of democracy).

Still, this is humor, and Greenburg finishes on a properly literate note, wrapping his words around a Graham Greene quote (an Underground fav):

The economy slips deeper and deeper into its trench, and yet the workspace for writers seems to get more crowded by the day as refugees from other professions take cover behind what they hope will be the respectability of the writing life. The other day, as I looked down on the field of cubicles from the “resting area” on the balcony, I felt an urge to read aloud from a Graham Greene story I had disregarded in my 20s: “Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your 40s, by performance and not by promise.” Harsh stuff. But don’t take Greene’s word for it, or mine. I’m a writer. Maybe I’m just trying to clear a little more room for myself at the workspace.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.