Ebook Review: ‘Write to More Money’

TITLE: Write to More Money: How to Ask For – And Get – More Money for Your Writing
AUTHOR: Paul Hancox
PRICE: $27

Why I Reviewed This eBook

This ebook looked interesting because it tackled an area in which so many writers, including yours truly, have encountered problems: Selling our services.

It is NOT a book about sales writing, which is a very different topic. Instead, it is about selling yourself and making your own writing service and standing out from the competition.

Many writers are not natural salespeople. Although they offer a quality service, they remain unable to distinguish themselves from the competition, and clients end up comparing them by price alone.

I wanted to see whether this ebook could shed light onto this area and provide information that writers of all abilities would be able to benefit from, or whether it would just be a list of the same old advice that we all already know.

Here’s what I thought:

eBook Overview

This ebook, or ‘report’ as the writer refers to it, is essentially a list of tips, advice, and actions which will help you to differentiate yourself from the competition and enable you to charge a higher price for your services – without worrying that clients will simply say: “But I can find the same thing cheaper elsewhere.”

Much of the advice contains information which clearly shows the sales experience of the author, and I for one now realize that there are a few things which I have been doing wrong all of this time.

Although some of the ideas covered have the potential to seem quite complicated, the author provides examples and descriptions in such a way as to make them very clear, and most importantly he shows how you can put them to use when selling your own services.

The Author

Although I’d never heard of him before, Paul Hancox is clearly a master of selling.

He mentions how he used to work in the home improvement industry where he had lots of cheap competitors (similar to online writers), and from this he built up a lot of face-to-face sales experience, which really shows through in the lessons he provides in this ebook.

He has experience as a copywriter and has been selling online since 1998. He also sells a video copywriting course which he markets at the end of the ebook, and although I haven’t looked at this myself I imagine it goes into great detail about the process of writing sales copy.

He also has a website which you can find here, although I notice that the blog has not been updated for a while.

I could tell that he knows what he is talking about by the way nearly everything he said made me think: “Ah ha!”. He obviously knows how the minds of prospects ‘tick’, and whilst reading the ebook I was tempted to revisit my own sales material and rewrite huge swathes of it following the advice which he provides.

He writes in a very lucid style so that nothing is too confusing, and he also shows you how to put what he teaches you into practice which is very helpful.

Who is the eBook For?

One of the best things about this ebook is that it can be used by such a wide variety of writers.

As I mentioned earlier, many writers are very bad at selling themselves and their services, and just don’t ‘get’ it, instead resorting to complaining about clients who only compare them by their rates (see this blog post I wrote which is on this exact topic).

I have learned a lot over the years, but even so I still found myself thinking throughout the ebook: “I can’t believe I’m making this mistake”. His whole argument is that cheap writers are not ‘competition’, and this ebook is all about being able to put your rates up and get clients to be happy to pay them and really feel that they are getting value.

Basically, writers who feel threatened by cheaper writers, writers who are constantly selling their services on price alone, or writers just starting out and unsure how to sell themselves, could all benefit from reading this ebook.

Things I Didn’t Like

Let’s start off with a few of the things which I did not like about the ebook:

Early on the author highlights the importance of being able to write well, explaining that improving your writing skills is the first thing you can do to start charging higher rates. Although this is true, I felt that this section went on a bit too long and that he could have simply said, ‘Learn to write before reading on’, as opposed to providing information on how to improve your writing. Many writers reading the ebook will already know how to write well, so for me this was a bit unnecessary.
It would have been good to see some more examples of actual sales copy, either on his website or his email correspondence with clients. Although he does provide some good examples of the type of thing you could write, I always like to see real examples which have actually been put to use already.
He often mentions how you can charge higher rates for your articles, but then provides an example of charging $15 instead of $5, which seems very cheap to me. So whereas all of the tips he provides seem very useful, I found these example prices a little odd.

Things I Liked

Here are a few of the things which I really did like about the ebook:

His advice on market rates and how to prevent your writing from becoming a commodity (which can always be beaten on price by another writer) was very useful.
He provides a clear process for working out how you are different from other writers and how to convey these to your prospects properly rather than simply listing your skills.
There is a great section on the ‘price expectation’ of clients and how you need to educate them on the value of what they are getting from your services.
There is a good section on conditioning your prospects so that they expect to pay more for your services, so that when you tell them your prices they are more likely to pay for them.
It contains some excellent advice on offering reductions in the right way to lead your prospects to think that they are getting a really good deal.
None of the tips here are underhand or involve ‘tricking’ anyone. Some people have a natural distrust of anything which involves selling, but the author reassures you that you are just doing what you should be doing to get a fair rate for your skill, and he never suggests doing anything underhand or dishonest to achieve this.
I also liked the fact that it was very clear and easy to follow, and I never thought that any of the tactics were beyond my capabilities, even though I am not a natural salesperson.

Conclusion

This ebook contains great information on one of the most difficult things about being a writer: Selling yourself and your services.

Copywriters who write sales copy may know more about these techniques already, but for article and content writers who are not used to selling, most of the information in the book is very useful.

Reading this book will help you to take an honest look at what you are doing to win better clients, and what mistakes you are making which are preventing you from doing so.

Everything in this book is easy to implement, and I for one will definitely be changing a few of my tactics as a result of what I have read.

So if you want to find out how to charge higher rates and not worry about clients simply going off to find a cheaper writer instead, then I’d say this will make very interesting reading.