One of the (very few) podcasts I listen to is Chuck “the legend” Dixon’s podcast.
Chuck Dixon is officially the single most prolific comicbook writer who ever lived. (Some one was able to calculate that – it’s not just puffery.) And on a recent podcast he talked about a trick for coming up with great stories for comicbooks that is just as applicable to coming up with great ideas for email or sales letter themes and content. His example was how a Superman creative team would sometimes come up with their best stories.
Their secret:
By first coming up with a crazy cover idea.
No plot.
Not storyline.
No idea what it’d be about or what characters would appear in the issue.
The editor or writer would simply have a crazy idea of a cover for the artist to draw, and then they’d build the story around whatever that crazy image they had in their heads was.
Very cunning way to come up with stories.
It’s also a cunning way to build out cool emails and ads, too.
The human brain can come up with truly excellent ideas this way.
Some of the most powerful headlines and ad campaigns were created this way, where the copywriter(s) started with some super dramatic and intriguing headline and theme, then built the story, offer, etc around that.
I’m not really into “hacks.”
But this is definitely one hack that can work.
It’s also, for example, how I wrote my book Markauteur published last year.
The “theme” for the book was built around a single image that popped in my mind out of the blue while on a walk for the cover, before I started writing it or had so much as a title for it, much less writing the ad for it. And in many ways, the ad, the bullets, the offer, the way things are worded in the book and everything else about the book and the advertising (including the email campaign) were formulated around this image.
Something to think about when writing your ads.
Or, also, your subject lines.
Or, really, anything else.
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Ben Settle
