Sam Parr learned copywriting by hand-writing 100 historical sales letters over six months, then copying classic literature and scripts to internalize patterns. He recommends Neville Medhora's Copywriting Kourse, Joe Sugarman's Advertising Secrets of the Written Word, and Stephen King's On Writing as essential resources.
Do what I did, which was very labor-intensive and very effective, but it takes a lot of time, and that's called copywork. And so what I did was I got a hold of the 100 best sales letters of all time. I don't know what makes it the 100 best, but it's just famous sales letters. So then in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, before the internet really came around, and It even happened after that, but predominantly before that, these salesmen would send these letters to people's homes and they would try to convince people to get interested in buying a vacuum or an encyclopedia or a pair of sunglasses. And the— it was typically the— they typically wrote to wives. The housewife would take out her checkbook and be like, oh, this is really interesting. I need to buy this. And she would write a check, put it into the envelope and send it back. That's a lot of friction. And so these people were so good at using words because it was so expensive to send out all these letters. They had to be good. They were so good at using their words that they had to, that they convinced these strangers to write a check and mail it to them. And so I found these 100 letters. And if you Google best sales letters of all time, you're going to find them. And I would, I spent probably 6 months where I would spend about 2 or 3 hours a day. And when I was 22 years old, I would write them all out by hand. I would also do that with books. So The Great Gatsby, Saturday Night Live scripts, I would do it with movie scripts, just any piece of great writing I would do that with. And when you do this, it's kind of like how you learn an instrument, the way that we teach people how to play music. It's incredibly effective. So if I hand you a guitar or a piano, I don't say, go ahead, write a song. I tell you, copy the Star-Spangled Banner. Go play Jingle Bells. Go look at Jimi Hendrix. Go look at Led Zeppelin. Play all this, all these, copy all these other people. Steal their work for a little while and, or whatever genre you're interested, go and copy them exactly. And in time you're gonna learn how to feel the texture. You're gonna see the patterns that work best. That works extremely well with writing and it's the same concept. I call it copy work. This is how a lot of people used to learn. Our school— our schooling, the way that we do it now, it's changed over the last handful of decades. But for a long time, people used to do this. Ben Franklin was a great writer, and he said this is how he learned how to write, and it's really effective. So it's called copywork. The second thing that you can do, and I'm biased, Neville is my good friend, but there's a guy named Neville Medhora, and I actually met him because I bought his course. And I bought his course. And then after I took his course, I became friends with him. And years later, we became best friends and he was the best man at my wedding. So I love Neville. And so I'm biased. But his course is what I took to learn about copywriting. He's got this course called Copywriting Kourse. It's spelled with a K. Copy with a K and course with a K. I don't know. It's how it stands out. It's a great course. I don't know how much it costs right now. It could cost a few hundred bucks or $100. I don't even know. But it's relatively affordable, and I think if you don't like it, he'll refund you his money— your money. But anyway, it's a great course, so it teaches a lot of this, this stuff. It's worth it. It's totally worth it. And I actually think I used to promote this so much that if you go to copywritingcourse.com/sam, I've got like a referral link, and I think there's like a $50 off code or something you could use. So if that interests you, do that. The third thing is this book called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. It's a great book. It costs $10, and I bet you if you Google it correctly, you can find a free PDF of it online. It's a great book that walks you through copywriting principles and why certain things work and why they don't. And finally, the last thing, it's not a copywriting thing, but it's a writing thing, and it's a book by Stephen King called On Writing. And the first half of the book is, it reads really fast. It's only 250 pages maybe. The first half, it's all about his tools and tricks and his toolbox, he calls it, his toolkit or his toolbox for writing well. And it's incredibly effective. He has got rules like don't use too many adverbs or keep your sentences short, things like that. It's incredibly effective. It's a great book on writing. The second half of the book is about his biography and it's really, really fascinating. So it's called On Writing by Stephen King. So the second skill set that I wanted to go through, copywriting. I think that because I know how— I would say I'm a pretty good copywriter. I'm a B. Because I am a B copywriter, until the day I die, I will never be homeless. I will always make money. Now, verdict's still out if I'm gonna be very, very wealthy, but I will bet everything, which I am betting everything by starting businesses and things like that. That no matter what happens, I will always be able to make a really good salary, whether as an employee or selling someone else's products. So I think that copywriting is incredibly effective. It's, it's just, it's really useful for your life, business, and just living.
