Ben Settle

A couple months ago I was grilled by Brian Kurtz in his Titans Xcelerator group, along with my biz partner at BerserkerMail Troy Broussard, about…

Pictures/graphics/images in emails.

Brian was keen to hear why we ban them from our BerserkerMail platform.

And there are many reasons besides just potential inbox deliverability problems.

For example:

It helps keep pricing down since it’s less load on the servers. It also means not having to waste resources policing the platform for explicit images, complicit viruses, or illicit tracking code evil people like to embed inside graphics. Plus, there no having to waste development resources – us and our clients – trying to keep up with all the various ISP-specific, device-specific, or email reader-specific spam filter rules with images (like text-to-image ratios, etc).

Then there’s writing-side of things.

Specifically, creating Vision that leads to buying from your business.

Images in emails are presumably designed to create vision.

But all they mostly create is scrolling (the weakest form of engagement you can get when selling something) and/or creating objections depending on the image. In my own business it has always been far more profitable to let the reader’s imagination create that vision – based on their needs and wants, not mine – that inspires them to want to buy, and not me trying to shoehorn it unto them.

That is how I use “images” in emails.

And with no worrying about spam filters, rules, image sizing, etc necessary.

This is literally copywriting 101 we’re talking about here.

Following was shared on Twitter by a fellow named Ed Reay.

I don’t know how old the ad is he pulled it from.

But it’s a perfect example of what I am referring to:

“Did you ever notice that when you’re fat, men don’t look you in the eye? They look across your shoulder. There’s no eye contact. My name is Leslie McClennahan I’m a real person. I live near Goose Creek, South Carolina. Up until two years ago, I was never looked in the eye. By anyone.”

Helluva start to an ad.

And the above words conjure a different image, depending on who is reading it, totally “custom designed” just to that specific person’s needs/wants/desires/situation/insecurities/pains/frustrations/life experiences. And because it’s their own imagination, that image is going to be a whole lot more engaging, emotional, dramatic, relevant, and horrifying than anything some wannabe edgelord can fap out of Midjourney.

It can often go beyond just email media, too.

Like, for example, one of my customers told me:

“I won the small prize of being best speaker at Toastmasters the other night. The headline was ‘How many billions did Figure 2 cost?’. (I’ll spare you the details). Because I listen to elBenbo, I didn’t put any images in my speech. Instead I used the power of my words to describe Figure 2! Much cleaner, less clunky, more engagement – would never had done that before! (Literally the whole speech was on a diagram and they never saw it lol).”

You can obviously do whatever you want and works for your business.

But in my opinion and experience, if you know know what you’re doing you won’t need ‘em. And I daresay you’ll also do a far better job of using images with words than you will with slick graphics and pretty pictures and edgelord AI-generated memes.

Which reminds me of another point made on the call with Brian’s people:

The importance of controlling the end-to-end user experience.

All the great merchandisers focused first and foremost on the end-to-end user experience. Walt Disney and Steve Jobs were especially obsessed with that. They did not want to leave that experience to chance. And no matter what your favorite goo-roo prancing around the seminar stage says, emails all look different, show different, and simply are different across various devices — phone (Android vs iPhone), iPad, desktops, laptops, including on how new or old said devices are and how up-to-date the software is.

For example:

I see marketers using HTML tables in their emails, instead of letting text wrap naturally.

Why?

I don’t know.

Probably some goo-roo told them they tested it and it gets “more response!”

And while having a pretty HTML table in your emails is not bad in and of itself, there are many times when people read them on a smart phone and have to use their fingers to scroll to the end of each line to read it, and then finger scroll back to the beginning of the next line, to read that one. They can be unreadable even though they are often professionally designed.

You can never 100% get rid of this sort of thing, admittedly.

Sometimes boomers will complain to me about how they can’t read my emails across their 40-inch computer monitor — instead of just using their mouse to shrink the email reader window, where everything will naturally wrap nicely, at whatever is most comfortable for their eyes.

What can I say?

Nobody is perfect…

Point is, the more you can control the end-to-end user experience the better. Not to mention how inane emails with pictures can look to the rising number of people who turn off images altogether. They aren’t looking at anything but a blank square or, worse, multiple blank squares. Or, even worse than that: ALL blank squares.

I doubt anyone reading this would have image-only emails.

But a large number of ecommerce businesses do and it looks stupid.

I can already hear the goo-roo fanboys rapidly typing a reply:

“But I tEsTEd it!11”

Very few people are willing to engage in the long-suffering rigorous discipline and number of actions to a big enough number of leads a legitimate test entails. Yes, this includes me. I am a “write it and send it” and move on with my day and life kinda guy, and so I am probably the last person anyone should listen to about this. So instead, I listen to those who are able to do it, and who do the work, and who understand testing emails beyond shallow A/B split tests.

Take, for example, my business partner at BerserkerMail Troy Broussard:

* Was a nuclear submarine engineer for the Navy (where he had to do “for real” science, not the fake Fauci-like internet marking goo-roo science, or something could potentially blow up 3 miles out to sea).

* Was also the Executive Director of Technology for Encyclopædia Brittanica (running a $12 million department of developers and so knows how platform creators think).

* He also owned a multi-million SEO company (where he had to know what Google actually wants vs what some goo-roo guesses it wants).

* After that he was a world renown email automation specialist who routinely did the testing/tracking/automating for as many as 50 million emails per month (seeing all kinds of data, patterns, and buying behavior 99.9% of us will never see).

* He also wrote what at the time was considered the “bible” for a lot of Infusionsoft users using automation, which the great Perry Marshall even wrote the introduction to, if that tells you something.

And I can tell you this:

Listening to how a guy like Troy – an actual scientist, trained in using the scientific method, who practices what he preaches with it – approaches and conducts testing with email vs what these chuckleheads haunting social media all day say and do about the subject is a night & day difference.

All right that’s all I got to say about this today.

If you want more info on the paid Email Players issue go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

In which the question is asked:

Do you have any tricks to increase your attention going through [the course you are learning from] the third, fourth, fifth time etc. Or do you just let it wash over and see what jumps out? 

I find it incredibly difficult to focus after the first run because my brain says “you know this”. It’s one reason I liked Clientless copywriter so much, it’s a lot of overlap with Elbenbo press and other trainings but different enough that it was easy to focus. I got a lot out of that one because it was like doing another pass over familiar material.

It’s a good question and I don’t know I’ve ever written about it before.

He was asking specifically about our Low Stress Trading program so I will use that as the example. I knew nothing about trading or even what an “option” was before going through it. In fact, I spent a year or so selling it without even cracking the course open.

But when I did, I went through it over and over and over.

Ten or more times easily.

And I still go through it as I want to master it, not just “learn” it.

So at this point, it’s quite eclectic now.

I might listen to one of the bonus calls on rolling several times on walks or in the shower. Then get the bug to go through the Thinkorswim platform videos, then switch to the candlesticks video (still a mystery to me), then one of Troy’s “walk and talk” videos about managing covered calls, then leave the main training and re-listen to his “30 in 30” training (which, btw, is the holy grail for entrepreneurs who want to work literally only 5-10 minutes per month and probably even retire early if/when you get a big enough account…) for several passes… then go through other training that is relevant to me at the time.

Each time a new insight emerges and seeps deeper into my psychology.

If I get bored, or if my mind starts wandering, I switch to something else.

Anyway, that’s how I revisit info 10, 20, 50 times without going batty.

And you know what?

It’s worked out pretty good so far…

To learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

An Email Players subscriber (who I am not sure wants me to name him) asks:

Question for your “old days” when you were starting to sell EP or even before then with CM:

I’m trying to compare myself to where you were all the way back then if that helps.

Anyway, what percentage of your first time buyers do you think came from a one on one conversation before they bought their first product? 

Or, were you able to turn leads into buyers via automated emails only?

Most of the buyers who come from my daily emails are people who I’ve had a relationship with before they buy. 

My email list is small so I’m not sure if it’s my emails that aren’t working or if it’s par for the course as you grow and do things that increase your status.

Thanks for any guidance you can provide. 

I never talked to anyone.

I hate talking to people so that was out of the question. I started my list in 2002 and did hardly anything with it for the next 6 years except occasionally send emails, because that was what even the great Gary Halbert as well as what many internet guys said to do: only mail once per month or once per week or “when you have something to sell.” I was not taking Bruce Barton’s advice, using Joseph from the book of Genesis after he rose up in Egypt, as an example of what happens when you stop marketing regularly and people forget you.

(i.e., new kings arise who know you not.)

So I sent maybe 1 or 2 per month.

Luckily, in 2008 I heard the great and esteemed “High King of Email” Matt Furey himself being interviewed by Harlan Killstein and it totally changed my attitude, and I bought and aggressively applied Matt’s teachings on the subject from his original course he did back in 2005.

I started by mailing daily and selling ebooks, mostly.

Then in Fall 2009 I sold my first subscription offer.

It was a CD interview and transcript of the month product.

And while it was successful, and I could have easily built upon and grew it into something big… I hated doing it (interviewing people) and dissolved it after the 1st month. Shortly after that, I launched the Crypto Marketing newsletter (a print newsletter — which I loved writing) in Feb 2010. It lasted 30 issues, but was too general, and started to bore me writing it.

About a year before dissolving it, I launched Email Players.

The timing was ripe for it then, and it would be hard to replicate today, mostly due to me, ironically, as I spawned a lot of copycats. Including copycats who publicly bash me to this day thinking it is helping them, when really it just makes them less credible and trustworthy and shows their neediness. But at that time there was nobody doing what I was, to my knowledge. And there was certainly not today’s army of email marketing grifters saturating the market.

Timing is like that, though.

That’s why copying others is a crap shoot.

Yes, the pioneers take the arrows but they also get rich, while the tenderfoots just grift.

Anyway, Email Players launched to a small list of only about 3k people. And I did everything wrong at first: No back end, no 1-click upsells, sent only like 4 or 5 emails for the entire launch selling it, only one merchant account (the dumbest thing of all I could have done), and the list goes on. But even with all those mistakes it was successful enough to get me out of client work and create a bunch of copycats & trolls who still generously promote my business whether they realize they are doing it or not.

I have come to realize Dan Kennedy was right about that too:

You want people talking about you even if lies, attacks, etc.

All it does it bring people into your world.

And the quality people stick around, realize how low class the haters are, etc, and so it goes.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this helps anyone reading this. But my point to my customer was, you cannot compare yourself to me or anyone else. Everyone’s situation is different. Your way will not look like my way. It will be unique and, I would argue, it MUST be unique.

Hence there is no typical or benchmark.

It’s just doing the work, making mistakes, making discoveries, and moving forward. Everyone reading this email has assets & attributes I did not, just as I have assets and attributes you do not. And there are other people out there in the same boat as you who have assets & attributes neither of us do, but wish they had yours or mine.

You take what you have and do what you can with it.

To learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Behold this question about having enough ideas to write daily (7x week) emails:

“oh I have so much RESISTANCE to this. I already feel I email my list a lot (3x/ week usually). I know you must get this a lot, but what do you send on the days you don’t feel like you have anything interesting or valuable to say?”

The bottleneck is, you are making it about you, instead of them.

If you make it about them the problem switches to having TOO many ideas.

For example:

My highest converting emails in weight loss (a market I am not “part” of, so not as easy as writing to my main list) rarely focused on claims, or testimonials, before & after pics, promises of losing inches, whatever. Nor did I ever once struggle with what to write about o. If anything I had too many ideas to write about and it was a matter of picking which ones.

The reason?

Because they were not about me, they were about them.

Take, for example, an email I did about a woman despairing because her friends were always trying to sabotage her weight loss goals demoralizing her by deliberately tagging her heavy Facebook pics. I didn’t ‘write’ that. The market did – it was a true story. And it did ridiculously well, while barely mentioning the offer. In fact, before the great “World’s Most Feared Negotiator” Jim Camp died, I was on a live teaching call with him, and told him about that email. He said it was a great example of what he would teach about influence-by-Vision.

But it was not MY vision, but the market’s.

It’s the difference between having a market-first vs a marketing-first approach to copywriting.

Market-first puts writing emails on easy mode.

Since I’m already doling out my favorite copywriting lessons, here’s another one. But, it’s not from me. It’s from one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived under God’s blue earth: the great Doug D’Anna, who I have learned much from about this over the years. He has this idea he teaches “the bridge to the breakthrough” and it goes like this:

Copywriting is not about building a bridge from your product to your prospect.

It’s about building a bridge from your prospect to your product.

It really is that simple.

Unfortunately, though, nobody but nobody can complicate what’s simple like copywriters. I don’t why that is, as it should be the exact opposite. And that is why as far as copywriting techniques go, the most important of them all is simply learning, practicing, and honing one’s ability to reduce the complex and complicated into something simple and consumable.

Do that and you almost can’t lose.

I don’t care if it’s sales letters, videos, courses, emails, or public talks.

Master this skill and you can have almost anything you want.

“But BEN!!! Is there a course that will show me this????”

No.

And if there was, it probably wouldn’t be very useful. This comes from doing the work, putting in the time, making the mistakes, learning from your blunders, connecting with your customers every day… rinse & repeat over and over and over and over… for months, years, and decades. The beautiful thing about email is it lets you practice this while making sales at the same time literally every day to speed up the process.

In my experience the #1 thing a copywriter can do is mail their list daily.

Yes, daily.

Even if you have no list, write an email as if you do.

Then get to work building it, growing it, serving it.

To learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A few years ago, my accountant wrote this ditty to his clients:

If you use the Postal Service to mail your tax returns, spend the extra money for certified mail. For $3.75 you can purchase certified mail. Yes, you will have to stand in a line (or you can use the automated machines in many post offices), but you now have a receipt that verifies that you have mailed your return.

About fourteen years ago one of my clients saved $2.42 (I think that was the cost of a certified mail piece then) and sent his return in with a $0.37 stamp. It never made it. He ended up paying nearly $1,000 in penalties and interest…but he did save $2.42.

It boggles the mind how expensive being cheap can be.

Most people demand everything fast, free, and yesterday.

And most people are dirt broke – which I doubt is a coincidence.

Another example is email:

I’ve lost count of how many email marketers — who supposedly “know their numbers” — will cheap out on what is essentially the beating heart of their business by price shopping for the platform they use. They will take gigantic hits in inbox deliverability, time lost and never to be regained from diddling around with clunky interfaces, and whining about having to pay per email (which is becoming the norm for all ESPs anyway, wild west of the internet has ended, Tex…) instead of focusing on building a better list, writing better emails, and making better offers, building out 1-click upsells, and delivering experiences that would allow them to more than recoup that money if they were simply in front of more leads — including leads who aren’t getting their emails at all due to them being so cheap.

Another example:

Our Low Stress Options company.

A small handful of people (we don’t cater to cheap people, so get very few of them) over the past few years have used Low Stress Options to make out so well that the monthly fee to use the software, get ongoing guidance, etc is the proverbial drop in the bucket… but they dropped out thinking they are “saving” money, which those of us using it, learning, growing inside it, getting better (and, thus, making more profits as a result, far more than the measly monthly fee) laugh at their small thinking.

Ten years ago this sort of thing used to astonish me.

I just could not fathom why anyone would step over dollars to pick up pennies.

But then I realized some people are just born cheap.

It reminds me of the guy who bought Marvel Comics and they went bankrupt many years ago. He was also so cheap he made employees use the public rest room to save on the water bill, and would go around at night looking for staples and paper clips, and penalizing people for not reusing them.

So this is definitely a thing.

Personally, I am convinced these types cannot help themselves and it’s literally in their DNA, probably. These are often also the types who live and die by a spreadsheet in marketing focusing only on the bottom line, while ignoring the intangibles of time, emotion, and energy that, if invested properly, add MORE, not less, to ye olde big ol’ fatty bottom line (revisit this last December Email Players issue for more on that). These types will both literally and figuratively drive 50 miles out of their way to save five cents per gallon on gas.

I wish I could say that was an exaggeration.

But alas… no.

I’ve seen this and much worse, and you probably have, too.

I almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.

Because, they are not innocent victims, they are willing victims. And in my experience, there’s not much you can do in these cases but price your offers in such a way that scares them off like the timid little woodland creatures they are behaving like, and focus on people who do value time, comfort, and convenience over a few pennies saved.

I don’t know who needed to hear this.

But I can think of a handful of people on my list who will take offense.

And that’s good.

I said what I said, and so it is.

Things ain’t getting cheaper, after all, so you might as well learn how to sell.

To learn how to do that see the paid Email Players newsletter:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

When you are in direct marketing long enough, you eventually get haters.

Of course, a lot of what haters say are lies and projection. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say they weren’t right about me sometimes, too. Like, for example, the people hating on me for my deadline rules.

Yes, dear reader, I am a dick about deadlines.

One guy even called me a “Deadline Nazi”, which was amusing.

And they absolutely are right about that.

I simply don’t care the excuse, or circumstance, or the person asking me to make exceptions for my deadlines. Long time customers, peers, and even good friends, or just people I highly respect up in this bid’niz, have been denied access to premiums & discounts due to missing a deadline. I have no doubt left much “spreadsheet money” on the table as a result. But spreadsheet money is a pittance, in my experience, to the long term sales that come from the benefits of enforcing deadlines.

Even good friends have wondered if I do this just for the sake of being an arsehole.

But that has nothing to do with it.

I do it first and foremost to serve the very people who think I am being a jerk.

What I mean by that is this:

By being a “Deadline Nazi” people who missed out from their not being able to tell time or from just being flakey or even from legitimately missing out for legitimate reasons beyond their control (which is rare, it’s almost always from them not paying attention, not the deadline itself)… are often the first people to buy the next time I have a special offer or launch something or sell something as an affiliate with a clearly defined deadline attached to it.

And, I have long noticed they develop better overall attitudes, too.

In other words:

Obnoxiously enforced deadlines not only make them better customers… but better people, too. I have seen this enough times to know this is not a fluke. The mentally unstable ones will keep hating on me for it. But the normal people, who I want to deal with, are the opposite.

And a big part of that is sticking to my deadlines.

Added to which it’s rather selfish of people to ask to make exceptions in the first place.

Why should someone who played the flake (my affiliate, product launch, and special sales campaigns are almost always at least 4 if not 5 days — plenty of time to buy) get special treatment over someone who was a responsible adult and grown up and bought within the deadline time, didn’t wait until the last 30 seconds where a cart can hiccup or a card can be rejected for any reason or no reason at all… and respected my time and business?

The answer:

They shouldn’t.

They should be punished.

And that punishment, like when punishing any bad behavior, leads to good behavior. Or, at least, makes it more likely to result in good behavior. People want to mystify this but it’s just plain common sense. The small thinking and Needy mind cannot comprehend it, though. And the small thinking and Needy are usually the haters and trolls anyway.

That is no coincidence in my opinion.

Anyway, I don’t know where else I’m going with this other than to throw some red meat to the responsible and curious.

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Ben Settle

Or, at least, an argument certainly can be made:

“There are tons of people who hate me. They hate my movies and whatnot. But you know, hey, my films have made a lot of money around the world. 2-something billion dollars, that’s a lot of tickets. They said that I wrecked cinema. They said that my, uh…cutting style. They say I cut too fast. And yet now you see it in movies everywhere. Do I take pride in people knowing my style? I think it’s nice people know a director has a style. And you can reinvent yourself, too.”

i.e., he told the critics and the movie snobs to Post Bizeek.

I remember when his 1st Transformer’s movie came out, a popular magazine called it:

“A fanboy’s wet dream”

Which may have been the most accurate media line ever penned.

All Michael Bay movies are like that.

I don’t care if it’s his magnificent movie “The Rock” or Transformers 2.

The reason Bay’s movies make so much money is because he caters to the fans. He does NOT cater to gatekeeping executives, snobby movie critics who probably can’t even use their iPhone’s camera much less a movie camera, or pedantic film nerds on Twitter and Facebook high on estrogen-fueled rage at Marvel movie casting decisions while typing just to hear themselves write.

Bay delivers exactly what his fans want:

Big explosions, hot chicks with big bewbs, and lots and lots of big action scenes.

More:

I’ve been an unrepentant Michael Bay fan since I first saw “The Rock” in 1996. To me that was the coolest movie I’d ever seen — and in some ways still is. And early on in my copywriting career, I deliberately used Michael Bay movies as my “template” for sales letters and emails much like Gene Schwartz used Joel Silver movies as his. My approach was to, no matter what clients, marketing goo-roos, or especially other copywriters said/thought of my ads/emails… cater to fans, just like in the way Bay does.

i.e., be the market’s wet dream.

If it’s writing to my own list, I give the fans what they want.

If it was writing for clients, I’d dig up what those fans wanted and cater to whatever it is.

Believe it or not, it was not unusual for some of my new clients to despise my work and drafts I’d hand in, argue with me about it, and only reluctantly run it… due to this approach. It wasn’t until after they ran one of my “fanboy” ads and saw the sales that they would trust me and let me do my job. Frankly, probably only one client ever really “got” this — and he was by far the biggest and most successful I’d ever worked for, as well as the most fun to work with. He was the kind of client where you think are you going to far and then he goes in and takes it even farther.

A true rarity.

It’s probably why at the time he floated the idea to me that, “We should write screenplays.”

To this day I take the same “cater to the fans” attitude in everything I write.

Yes, including articles and other non-copywriting content.

Example:

A couple weeks ago, I ghost wrote a newspaper article for the Oregon Eagle about our Low Stress Options Trading. While most financial articles are dry, boring, and stuffy… catering to boomers who think “buy and hold” is still a good idea in 2025 when most companies only last about 10 years now (vis 70-90 years in the past) on the S&P 500… I went the opposite way and wrote only to the FANBASE section of the market we cater to. And I did it by picking a “fight” with the so-called Warren Buffett approach to investing and showing why Troy’s low stress trading approach is safer, sounder, and superior.

“Our” kind of people want what we have to say and love that.

Guys worried about retirement who think Buffett walks on water?

Not so much.

They want to still believe it’s 1984 and will almost certainly turn their noses up at it in the same way Bay’s critics turn their noses up at his films, even as we collect more leads (fans), cater to them, have a long term mutually profitable relationship with them for months, years, and probably will continue to have even for decades.

One more thing.

Call it a fun juxtaposition of the times if you want.

But around the same time I saw that Michael Bay interview I also saw an interview clip on Twitter posted by a guy named Nerdrotic. The interview featured Troy Duffy who was the writer/director of the popular Boondock Saints movie.

And he put it like this:

“One of the very first lessons I learned in the movie business, which is if you are lucky enough to have a fan base, you do what they want 100% of the time or you’re f–cked”

Indeed.

Anyway, give the fans (market) what they want. Ignore all critics, clients, copywriters, your idiot Facebook friends, and anyone who tries to get you to do it any other way. And if you need some inspiration for this then fire up a Michael Bay movie.

Whatever movie you choose will NOT make you any smarter.

It may even temporarily seize an IQ point or two.

But I daresay it’ll make you better at copywriting, emails, content creation, and direct response.

And you want to know something else?

If you take the info in this email and combine it with what I teach in the paid Email Players newsletter you almost can’t lose, in my totally biased (but no less true) opinion.

More on Email Players here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

When I wrote my 6th novel in the Enoch Wars series (Hell’s Frankenstein) I deliberately made it more exaggeratedly violent, gruesome, gross, disgusting, disturbing, and all-around horrifying.

The reason:

I knew it would be the shortest of the books.

And so I wanted it to be the most memorable — but in a creepy & disturbing & I would say heinous way to make it absolutely clear what evil looks like.

For example:

One of the scenes in the book has to do with a zombie eating a group of children in order to “power up” to open a portal to hell. And, a full seven years before everyone outside of Q anon was talking about adrenochrome due to the movie Sound of Freedom came out, I was playing with the theme of evil (in this case a zombie) growing stronger, younger, and more powerful in direct proportion to how much terror-prompted adrenaline is in their victims’ (children especially) blood at the time they consume them. Between that and what I write about in the 9th novel “Serpent Seed” — also touching on themes a full year or two before the mainstream caught on, but that I have been studying for nearly 30 years now — in some ways I argue, in my totally biased & irrational opinion, my novels are turning out to be spoiler alerts…

Anyway, back to the writing lesson:

It was already a disturbing, disgusting, gut-wrenching scene to write in 2016.

But after Willis started crawling the earth four years later?

I don’t know I could write that scene or story.

In fact, I remember asking my publisher Greg Perry if I should edit that scene. That it was way too disturbing, even for Enoch Wars. And that maybe, just maybe… I took it a bit too far. But I will never forget what he said in reply, almost dismissively, as if I had just asked the dumbest question ever conceived:

“No. Let monsters be monsters.”

He was, as usual, correct.

And so I left it in.

But it’s an even more disturbing scene to me now post Willis. And this is the case even though I used a technique I learned from A Clockwork Orange (the movie) I learned in a film class back in 1995. That technique being to “blunt” and make horror and violence a bit more palatable by putting an almost cartoon-like spin on it. In A Clockwork Orange, for example, when Alex is being forced to watch films about violence and rape, Kubrick made the victims have almost clown-like hair or exaggerates the goofiness of their surroundings, etc.

They come off as just bizarre details to the uninitiated.

But I suspect it was deliberate, probably to try to appease the censors.

Whatever the case, I used it in Hells’ Frankenstein.

I don’t want to give the punchline away, but I like to think it ultimately worked as intended.

On the other hand:

The 9th novel (Serpent Seed) was the only book in the series written after Willis was born. And it had a huge impact not only on the story, but also the themes and emotional content I poured into it, that would never have been in there otherwise. As a lots od parents know, having a child totally changes the way one looks at the world. And it is reflected in that book vs the other eight.

Same with my late dog Zoe.

She was dying as I wrote and did the first round of edits on Serpent Seed.

And there is an epilogue (about a dog) that I deliberately waited until after Zoe passed until I wrote it. Literally the same week, while mourning her death, I poured it all into that epilogue. That epilogue would not have had the same impact had I written it a decade earlier, a year earlier, a month earlier, or even a week earlier.

The point of all this?

I am not sure there is one point.

But I will say this:

There is a scene in the movie Sideways where the character Mia is telling Miles about her approach to wine tasting and enjoying. She doesn’t just think about the wine. She thinks about the people who picked the berries and bottled it. How many of them might be dead by the time she drinks it. And she is cognizant that a bottle of wine is a living, breathing entity that will taste different on the day you open it than if would if you opened it on any other day — past or future.

That is how writing works.

What you write today would be totally different if you wrote it yesterday or tomorrow, a year ago or a year from now, a lifetime ago or towards the end of your life. This email would not be the same if I had written it yesterday, or if I waited until next week.

Would it be better or worse at another time?

No idea.

And neither will you with your writing.

All you can do is release the Kraken and write.

The good news is, God invented editing.

And editing can save many an email, sales page, article, book, or, yes, novel.

All this applies to my email methodology in the paid Email Players newsletter as well.

More on that here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A new subscriber to my list thinks he found a glitch:

“when you click on the link on your [blog] labeled ‘emailplayers . com’, instead of going to emailplayers . com, it redirects back to your blog with the CTA being to sign up for the newsletter and app”

Once every few years or so, someone will point this out, thinking it is a glitch.

But it is that way by design since 2011 or 2012.

And it has helped grow my email list with a lot of responsive, pre-qualified leads.

Why do this?

Because the only purpose of my website is to build my email list. That is it. And so, I could not care less if someone already on my email list ever goes back to my website (like the guy above did for whatever reason)… unless it is to resubscribe if they for whatever reason leave the list. And, in fact, anyone finding & buying any of my main offers without first getting on my list are not qualified for such offers anyway, unless/until they get on my list. And that is why they are punished for not first getting on my list, with higher prices and less access to free content they can only get by being on my list.

All roads lead to the list.

It can be a free list or selling an offer up front that puts them on a buyers list. But the power of direct marketing is the list. Always has been, and always will be. “All roads lead to the list” is the most reliable direct marketing principle I have ever followed. The list is (or should be) the beating heart of a direct response business.

I don’t care what you’re selling, either.

This is literally direct marking 101.

But these days?

So few take this attitude it might as well be 401-level class.

As for monetizing an email list?

That is where the paid Email Players newsletter comes in.

More on that here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle