A recent headline on msn.com read: “Why are teen moms poor?”

Is this a serious question? They’re poor because they are teenagers who have children. Children are expensive, and most teens earn and have little or no money. Mystery solved, right?

A TV commercial for the new movie “Snow White and the Huntsman” dramatically proclaims — “This is no fairy tale!”

It reads well and sounds dramatic.

The only problem: it’s not true. Anything about Snow White is by definition a fairy tale. So the copy is  one big lie.

Am I being a nitpicker here? Or am I right on the money?

In The Writer magazine (6/12, p. 15), my favorite novelist, Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini), writes that “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.”

He continues: “It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.”

This sounds nice, but do you buy his claim that good writing is really the hardest form of thinking? I think for most people, the hardest form of thinking is mathematics.

My youngest son is a freshman at Carnegie-Mellon. He took a course in “calculus in three dimensions.” I would wager that calculus in three dimensions is more difficult for most students than English composition.

What do you think?

One area of uncertainty among service providers is how often to follow up with prospects.

Not often enough and you may lose an opportunity to another vendor who is more visible.

Too often and  you risk being an annoyance.

One technique that helps is to make sure you are NOT being a pest when you follow up.

Whether I am following  up by phone or e-mail, the first thing I say is “I don’t want to be a pest, but … ” followed by a brief description of why I am calling.

This works amazingly well. Almost without fail, the prospect replies, “You’re not being a pest — I am glad you followed up!”

I don’t know what about “I don’t want to be a pest, but” works. I only know that it works like magic.

Today I received an e-mail from a semi-famous business author. In it, he announced that he was working on a new best-seller.

Not to nitpik, but I beg to differ. He is working on a book that he HOPES will be a best-seller. But to describe the book-in-progress as a best-seller in the present tense is silly.

He may think his book has a good shot at  making the best-seller list. But it certainly hasn’t yet.

In his e-mail, he also refers to the book as “a guaranteed best-seller.” Again, NO ONE can guarantee that their book will be a best-seller, even if their previous books have been.

This is a good example of hype  that in my view goes a little too far. It is dishonest and not credible.

Here are some facts about the eco-friendliness of paper direct marketing (direct mail) vs. electronic direct marketing (e-mail) from my fellow copywriter Marjorie Bicknell: 

* Only 1.8% of household waste is from advertising direct mail messages and catalogues.
* Direct-mail accounts for just 2.4 percent of landfill waste
* 54.7 percent of all paper in the U.S. is currently recycled.
* A single e-mail contributes 9 grams of CO2.
* 95 trillion spam emails were sent in 2010.
* Spam alone requires an energy use equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million U.S. homes. 
* In 2005, the amount of electricity consumed by data centers globally was equivalent to the production of 14 coal-fired 1,000-megawatt power plants.
* A single web server can produce more tons of CO2 in a year than a car.
* The net effect of running all of the servers in the United States is equal to that of five nuclear power plants

Publishers today only want to publish books by authors with a “platform.”

A platform is (1) a visible presence in a market and (2) one or more channels through which you can reach that market.

Editors looked for such things as whether the author had a column, TV or radio show, even an infommercial.

But now, as a potential author you have to build  your platform online too.

In your book proposals, publishers want to know: (a) number of Facebook fans, (b) Twitter followers, (c) LinkedIn connections, (d) sales of prior books, which the can now confirm easily online, and (e) web site statstics especially unique visits per month.

If you ignore social media like I do, you are soon going to find it next to impossible to sell  your book idea to a mainstream publisher.

With everyone self-publishing POD (print on demand) books and Kindle e-books today, maybe that doesn’t much matter to you.

But I’m old school. I like “real” books — books that are made of paper, professionally designed, and published by a traditional publishing house, which still (in my opinion) produce books of quality a full step higher than the average self-published affair.

What’s the easiest marketing task in the world?

It’s putting up a web site that looks pretty and reads well — but doesn’t have to sell anything or generate any other kind of measurable response.

I know, because the most common call I get as a copywriter is this: “We put up a web site and everybody says how great it looks, but we aren’t getting any sales. Help!”

It may be that I am envious of general marketers that don’t have to produce results. If they put up a web site that’s aesthetically pleasing, and that the client praises, they are the hero.

As a direct response copywriter, if I don’t increase the conversion rate of my client’s web site or landing page, I am the goat.

Do you agree with me that creating direct marketing is more difficult and takes more skill than general marketing?