Joe: That book caused me to be transformed as a copywriter.

Michael: This is a wonderful conversation I had with Joe Vitale. Looking for hard to find classic marketing books in old reference books of great ads in classic material on advertising. Marketing and how to write sales copy is a passion of mine. Joe Vitelli has the large marketing library in the world with over 5,000 books. Listen in as we talk about his experiences as a professional copywriter and marketer. In this conversation he's going to give you some wonderful ideas and some wonderful reference of some of the real classics. I hope you enjoy this.

Joe: Hello, this is Joe.

Michael: Joe, it's Mike Senoff in San Diego.

Joe: Mike, how are you? I'm doing well.

Michael: How about yourself?

Joe: I'm doing great on this Friday.

Michael: Can't believe it's already Friday again, huh?

Joe: Yeah, it's Friday. What does it matter to people who are self employed? Some days I look and I have no idea what day it is.

Michael: Yeah, let me tell you, some days Friday comes and I say damn. Now the damn weekend. I can't, you know, work on all these great projects I have.

Joe: Oh, I go ahead and work on them.

Michael: Yeah, I know. Believe me, I fight. I fight tooth and nail for every bit of time to do it myself.

Joe: Right.

Michael: Well, look, I had a chance to look at your site. You got a lot of things going.

Joe: I've been busy, I've been prolific, but I've just been having fun. That's really all I've been doing. I get excited about a project, I pursue it, I get it done and I go on to the next thing.

Michael: Exactly.

Joe: Basically a roller coaster ride with a lot of thrills and spills.

Michael: When you emailed me back and you said, what are we going to talk about? And I did have to think about. We could talk about so many different things, obviously, and we only have so much time. And I did think, and I look at what my customers are looking for, what people who visit the site are asking for, and I think copywriting. And I know you have a great love for copywriting and you've done a lot of research because I've listened to some of your stuff and I've also seen video and I know you're a real student of the old writings and I think that's great. I think maybe we can stick to that subject. And as far as the format of our talk today, the whole concept of my site is I want to leave for anyone who wants information on copywriting, direct marketing, business, how to make money, just some of the greatest information out there available and we could sit and talk about, you know, things that are already in your book. But I wanted to try and target my talks with people, maybe a little more personal, because people want to see. Well, how did. How did Joe get to be where he is today? What, you know, what are some of the reasons that led you there? Just kind of like your journey and your story. I think that's really interesting stuff. And I know a lot of the people listen to this stuff, like that kind of stuff.

Joe: Okay.

Michael: Because they can relate it to themselves. Well, if this is the steps Joe took to get to where he is, and I want to be like him and write like him and sell like him and market like him, maybe if I follow these same steps, I can do it, too.

Joe: Got it.

Michael: You see, because they can go buy your books and we'll certainly direct them to your website and all your different things, they can go hear it all for themselves. Right?

Joe: That's exactly right.

Michael: Okay, so tell me, where are you from originally?

Joe: I'm originally from Niles, Ohio, Western boy. And I spent the first 20 some years up there. And I've been in Texas for the rest of the time, which is well over 20 some years. And I now live in the hill country outside of Austin, Texas, Between Austin and San Antonio.

Michael: Right, right. How old are you?

Joe: I'm 48. I'll be 49 in a couple months.

Michael: Okay. What were you like as a kid? Were you entrepreneurial?

Joe: No, I was very much interested in a wide variety of things. So much so that it was confusing because I didn't know what I would end up doing. I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be an attorney, I wanted to be a magician, I wanted to be a detective, I wanted to be a reporter, I wanted to be a baseball player. And I went through various cycles where I very sincerely pursued each one of those. And I'm talking about as a kid, not as a young adult. And I stumbled across writing at one point and something shifted within me that said, you can be all of these different roles that you would like to be if you are a writer. Meaning that I could write fictional type works or plays or even nonfiction books, coming from all those different perspectives.

Michael: How old were you?

Joe: I was probably 14, 15, 16 years old. And I met Rod Serling, the creator of Twilight Zone, when I was 16. And that was a turning point for me because I had idolized him for a very long time. I was a big fan of Twilight Zone. He was one of the reasons that I wanted to become a writer. But when I met him, it was a tremendous disappointment. Disappointment because he was human. I expected him to be superhuman. I expected him to show up on this stage that he was speaking at in Youngstown, Ohio, and just appear in a puff of smoke. Well, there was a puff of smoke because he was a chain smoker, but he was a regular guy. And I remember asking him if he was going to write his autobiography and he thought about it and said, no, nothing's really happened to me. Here is this superstar in television, this famous script writer, making all kind of great money, bringing out people to hear him speak. And he hadn't thought he accomplished anything. He had self esteem issues. He was just a little run of a guy. He was afraid of a lot of different things. So anyway, it was an inspiration to meet him. And because of the disappointment of seeing that he's human, I realized if he can do it, I can do it.

Michael: Absolutely. I'm the same. Yeah, I'm the same way. Once you can meet someone and really kind of feel them out and you have an image in your head that, you know, he's a guru or he's that. But the bottom line is, you know, you're a man just like any other man. You got the same problems. Your wife probably nags on you leaving your underwear on the floor or not picking up your towel. And, you know, we all have the same problems.

Joe: Yes.

Michael: Okay. So that was an inspiration in a way, because you realized if the guy, if he can do it, you can do it. And that gave you confidence.

Joe: Absolutely. It was a turning point for me. I began to more wholeheartedly begin to pursue the career of being a writer. And I really went after it with an intensity and a gusto that even humbles me today when I look back on it.

Michael: What were you doing?

Joe: I remember as a kid walking a mile and a half, which isn't that big of a deal, but I would do it in the cold of the winter as well as in the summer to go to the downtown library in Niles, Ohio, which was a famous Library Because William McKinley, our 25th president, was born in Nile. And they've got a big museum there at the library for him. And I would walk to that library and there were entire sections that I would go through book by book, reading those books, studying those books. And I still have a visual in my mind of sitting at a table at the library with all these books all over the place, with all these books opened up at different spots, with me having a notebook open and me writing out thoughts, passages, exercises, whatever it was That I was coming across, I was doing such intense work that it's amazing that I was such a poor student in school itself. And so in the regular school, you know, the public school, I wasn't doing very well at all because it didn't appeal to me, it didn't excite me, it wasn't speaking to my passions, to my heart, interest.

Michael: What'd your parents do?

Joe: My father worked on the railroad all of his life for 30, 40 years. And I mean as a laborer on the railroad.

Michael: Did that influence you?

Joe: Yes, it definitely did. He had me working on the railroad when I was five years old. Really? When I was five years old, he took me out, put me on the railroad tracks when he went out on jobs, put a pitchfork in my hand and taught me how to tamp ties, which is a very laborious type thing to do. And I did that for most of my life until I left Ohio in 78 or 79. I did that part time on weekends, sometimes on the evenings and almost every summer. And what it did for me is teach me that I didn't want to do that for my entire life.

Michael: There you go.

Joe: I hated was on some level, good exercise. On some level it was fun. On another level, it was a learning experience. But I always remembered that I had this fundamental goal, this compass in me that said, you're going to do writing, you aren't going to pursue your career as a writing. Anything that you're doing, whether it's on the railroad or anywhere else, is only a passing faith. It's momentary.

Michael: How about your mom?

Joe: My mom was basically housewife, raised to four kids and was very supportive in that way in a very traditional role.

Michael: All right, so you're in the library just trying to devour everything you can. Were you all over the place or were you getting to a direction of certain types of books that you were.

Joe: Really good question. I was very focused in a self help area. I remember reading lots of books on hypnosis when I was 15, 16 years old and actually practicing hypnosis with a dear friend of mine and even having a very scary experience one time where I put him in hypnosis and couldn't bring him out of it. I wrote about it on one of the articles on my website. It was a very influential experience.

Michael: You know, I have a fear that myself I had gone to. I was in college, college and I went to a hypnotist guy and I was out there in the audience and I'm probably pretty susceptible to that stuff. And he was doing the whole thing. And I came home back to the my house with all my roommates. And I felt like I was still hypnotized even. I had gone up to the Del Mar Fair here in San Diego a couple years back. And I was there during the day. I don't know what I was doing, but I sat down for a hypnot. Hypnosis presentation and I got up for fear that I was going to be hypnotized and wouldn't be able to get out of it.

Joe: Right.

Michael: Yeah. That's funny.

Joe: Well, for anybody who still thinks that that would happen, you will always come out of the trance. You will either fall asleep naturally or you will just shake it off. It may last a little bit, but it's not something to be afraid of. But it will be long term. Okay, but I didn't know that when I was 16 years old.

Michael: Were you trying to fix a problem that maybe you thought you had with yourself by learning some of this stuff?

Joe: That's a wonderful question. I don't know. I believe that I was interested in hypnosis, self help, psychic phenomena, anything that had to do with the further reaches of the mind. Because something in me said that we can achieve far more than we ever thought possible. So I don't think I was coming from a. I have something that needs to be fit frame of mind. I was coming from. From the sense that what most of us experience in life is a limitation of what's possible.

Michael: Right.

Joe: And I knew that intuitively when I was a kid. So I think my exploring was to explore what was possible.

Michael: Okay. All right, let's move on from those libraries and intensive research times. How long did that last?

Joe: Oh, in many ways it's still going on.

Michael: It is still going on. Okay.

Joe: Yeah. I think it's one of those things when I learned from martial arts when I was studying. That is that. But you're never done. There is no such thing as a finished master who knows everything about copywriting or a martial art or anything that you can name.

Michael: Absolutely. At what time did you start really focusing on copywriting?

Joe: I didn't focus on copywriting until the mid-70s or maybe right at 1980 or so.

Michael: And when we describe copywriting, why don't you give me your def… What do you. How would you describe. What is copywriting?

Joe: Yeah, copywriting is using words to sell. It's using words to influence and persuade people to buy something. Almost always.

Michael: Did you ever have a regular sales, like a direct sales job?

Joe: Oh, yeah, many of them. I worked as a car Salesman. That was a very big learning experience for me when I first came to Texas.

Michael: Did you sell BMWs?

Joe: No, I didn't. I sold new and used Chryslers. If I remembered, I might even have that wrong. I hated that job. I hated it. And it's basically because of how the salespeople were treated. I went through their training, and they taught us to make a profit off of every person walked in the store. Right down to, if your mother comes in, you sell her a car and you make a profit off of it, that's fine. And I did not like that.

Michael: What other direct sales jobs?

Joe: Oh, gosh. I sold biographical encyclopedias at one point, also in Houston, which was also not fun.

Michael: Well, you probably recognize that some of the greatest, most successful leaders and salespeople all had direct sales jobs.

Joe: Yes.

Michael: You know, you hear Gary Halbert talking about how he sold encyclopedias. I used to sell. My very first direct sales job was selling cutlery for Cutco cutlery.

Joe: Oh, interesting.

Michael: You ever heard of that?

Joe: Yes.

Michael: Okay. That experience is probably a great learning experience, at least for me. What it was was you couldn't leverage yourself because you could only make so many appointments during the day.

Joe: Oh, very good point.

Michael: Yeah.

Joe: You were very much on a one on one basis. One of the reasons that I'm very much into writing, whether it's copywriting or writing the books that I do, I used to be on the speaking circuit quite a bit, especially back in Houston. And while I could reach a certain level of number of people because I was speaking to crowds, I was wearing myself out doing it. Whereas if I write a sales letter or a news release or a book, I can remain sitting right here in my rocking chair looking out over my property in the Hill country, never have to leave here and reach people all over the world.

Michael: When did that light bulb come on?

Joe: That was probably when I started experimenting with sales letters. The late 70s, 1980s. Somewhere in there, I was writing some books. My first book was Zen and the Art of writing, back in 1985. And somewhere before that, I was experimenting with trying to make a living selling things through the mail. And in order to do that, I wrote my own sales letters. And I still remember the first time I got a check as a result of a sales letter I wrote. And the check was like $200 in the mid-70s, and it was a miracle. It was exhilarating.

Michael: Tell me about it. What was the sales? What was the product or the project?

Joe: The product was a software program that I wish was still around. Some people who have read my ebook Hypnotic Writing, see the sales letter for it in there and still want to buy that product because the salesletter was so strong. It was for a software program called Thoughtline. And Thoughtline was this artificial intelligence program, DOS based. It's never been upgraded for Windows or Mac or anything else. It was DOS based, which was what everybody was using at the time. And it would ask you questions. It would host an interview with you. It would ask you, okay, what are you going to write today? Or what is your project? Or what is your report? Or what is your book? You would answer, and it would build questions based on what you asked it or what you answered. And when you were all done, it would print out a report which was functionally your outline. And once you had that, you can flesh it out and you'd have your writing done. I mean, this was a remarkable tool. I still love it. I still think back to what a brilliant device that was. And so I wrote. I arranged to sell it. I was one of the first people to sell Thought Line to the public. When it first came out, I wrote a sales letter for it. And that sales letter reflected my enthusiasm. You might even be able to pick up some of my enthusiasm for that program even now when I'm talking about it. Well, think back to then, when it was fresh in my hand. And I was thinking like, this was the holy grail for anybody who wanted to do any writing. So I wrote a sales letter to reflect that. And the headline was something like, I finally found the secret to easy writing, Something along those lines. And I wrote this letter with this high energy and this high enthusiasm. It was very direct. It was like two pages long, full of enthusiasm and passion for this thing. And the orders started to come in.

Michael: Who did you mail to?

Joe: I think I ran in a mailing list of writers. And I don't remember if I. Gosh, you're asking me to think way back. I think it was from Gordon Burjet, who was a speaker who was on the speaking circuit. He may still be talking to speakers and writers about writing books.

Michael: Okay. Do you remember how many you mailed out?

Joe: My test mailing was probably only a couple hundred. And when I started to get orders, which was like $200 for the software program at that time, which was 80% profit to me. Amazing profit. I tasted blood. Oh, yeah, I tasted blood. I thought, oh, my God, what a wonderful world this is. I didn't know this. I don't even have to talk to anybody. I write one letter, which is my way of Talking to them. I send it out to all kinds of people. They feel like I just spoke to them. They write checks to me. It was amazingly wonderful.

Michael: It's exciting, very exciting.

Joe: I still owe thrilled to think back to that.

Michael: Wow. You know, I think people who listen to this or who listen to these don't have the confidence that this is really doable. You, you hear that, you're one letter away from your next million. And I absolutely believe that because you have the ability to duplicate that. If you were to try and convince someone, is this really real? Can you really make a living writing letters or sales copy to sell things?

Joe: Well, the answer is absolutely. There is no doubt whatsoever that you can make a living doing it. And at the same time, I say that I also admit that when I mailed my letter, I did not know it would work. I mean, I scrounged to get the money for the printing and the postage and to put that out there just for a mailing at that time. So I didn't know that it would work. I was taking a giant risk and I thought it is worth it. If it does work, wonderful. If it doesn't work, I will think of something else. Life will not stop. I will not die. I will not lose everything because of this. So to answer your question, yes, it can work. And also, I understand when people are nervous or they are feeling risky or they're feeling like, I don't know if I can pull it off or not. Well, you won't know if you don't try. Now there's so many things rushing into my head that I want to share. A couple things that immediately come to mind are things like, don't do the mailing. Don't send the sales letter out until you are absolutely positive without any kind of uncertainty that it is the best that you can do. That means that you're going to get people to review it. You may ask some peers, you may ask some people in your target audience to read the letter first. You may ask another copywriter, you may pay somebody to critique it. But you may do a lot of different things to be sure that this letter is as strong as it can be based on everything you know and all you can do at this time before you send it out. I've seen far too many people who try it on their own. Barely reading a single book on copywriting, barely writing any sales letters for practice, sending it out. Then they send it out to 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 people and then tell me I got no response, Right? Well, there's a number of factors. I mean, everything from the list is of the utmost importance. Whoever you're sending it to is probably the most important thing in a copywriting formula. What you're offering them is the second most important thing, and then the copy, how you're expressing your offer to them is the third. So the copy is actually the least, but all these elements have to be looked at before you can do it.

Michael: Let's talk about research, researching your market. How important is that? And use your example of the software you sold about you understanding what that product could do for a rider because you using it yourself.

Joe: Yeah, that's a good point. When it came to that particular product, when I was selling thoughtline, I was and still am a writer. So I knew that audience. I could speak to them because I am them, I am one of them. And so when I went to go and tell people about it, I knew what their trouble spots would be. I had also taught writing classes for quite a few years in Houston, and I had heard from a wide variety of people who said writing was hard work. I remember one woman who said she was unable to write her entire adult life because when she was a teenager, her father criticized something she wrote and she shut down. So I ran into those kind of people, and my letter was for those kind of people. But my research had been a very living, oriented one. I lived it. I knew people who had lived it. I knew what their problems were, and I addressed them.

Michael: So if you're going to take on a writing project, let's talk about that. You know, I saw your prices, you know, your price list of what you charge, and let me tell you, you're not cheap. You know, for the average guy looking at what Joe Vitale charges for his services, it isn't cheap. So, I mean, I want to take his advice is, you know, I'm getting some good free advice that would cost other people, you know, thousands of dollars.

Joe: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Michael: Do you remember how many of those pieces of software you sold, how often did you continue to mail on that software project?

Joe: I continued to mail for probably six months. And I would have continued for far, far longer. But a couple things took place that caused me to want to stop. And one of them was I could not keep an exclusive on the product.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: Especially when they saw how many I was selling and how well I was doing. The manufacturer of it, who, I forget his name. And actually, he ended up going bankrupt. He started to sell the rights to selling it to a lot of other people, and then all these other competitors Started to sell it at various prices until they got to the point that within months, other people were offering the same software program that I was selling for a couple hundred bucks they were offering for $19.

Michael: I got you.

Joe: And so it pulled the fire out of it for me.

Michael: Let's change gears a little bit. Who are your biggest influences when it comes to writing and copywriting?

Joe: I've been definitely influenced by two or three major players, and some of them haven't even been copywriters. I was influenced by the writings of Jack London. His very active, engaging writing style is something I still use in my writing today. If you go and read any of his fiction stories and even some of his non fiction stories, a lot of people know he wrote Call of the Wild in White Fang, but they don't know he wrote 55 books, many of them socialist works, a couple of them autobiographical. But his writing style was very masculine. It was very vibrant, it was very energetic, it was very active, it was very engaging. And those are all things that I still use in my writing today. And I learned it directly from Jack London.

Michael: Okay, so you kind of emulated his style in a way.

Joe: And during that period when I said that, I would go to the library, one of the things I was doing, and I encourage anybody who wants to write good copies to do today is I would pull out passages of Jack London's work as well as Mark Twain's and Ernest Hemingway's, and I would copy it word for word in my notebook because it was training my unconscious mind as well as my conscious mind to adapt their rhythm to my own style.

Michael: Did you do this on your own or do you read this as a good technique to be a good writer?

Joe: I did it on my own, but I might have read it at some point. I don't recall, because that goes back so far. I was definitely a disciple of Jack London. I was definitely a disciple of Rudolph Flesch, who wrote the Art of Readable Writing and the Art of Plain Talk and the Art of Readable Writing. Those were wonderful books. And he was all about speak the way you would normally talk, write the way you would normally talk. Don't be fancy, don't try to impress anybody. If you use certain cliches, use them because that's part of your character, that's part of your personality. It was very, very freeing to listen to him. And I still have his books beside me, even here.

Michael: What was he? Was he a writer? I want to thank you for listening.

Joe: This.

Michael: This is Michael Senoff with hardtofindseminars.com if you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview, please email me at Michael@hardtofindseminars.com he was an educator.

Joe: As I remember, he wrote numerous books that were geared for helping parents teach their children how to read and write better. Really?

Michael: Okay.

Joe: And I think the most famous book was the Art of Readable Writing. It's still in print, and the Art of Plain Talk is out of print, but I always loved it. And he created the readability formula which I used to use on my writing, which was a mathematical formula to find out just how complicated your writing was, really. And I think thoughtline and there were a few other readability programs that came out at the time that were all software programs that would analyze a piece of your writing on your computer and say, oh, this is complicated. Only an engineer could read it. Or, oh, this is too simple. It's for a grade school child. So that all influenced me.

Michael: Okay. Who else?

Joe: And then, of course, the number one most powerful influence in terms of copywriting on me was Robert Collier. Robert Collier influenced me during my teenage years because of his metaphysical book. I have a very metaphysical side to me. And I wrote Spiritual Marketing, which is very much from my heart when I was a kid. And I said I was interested in hypnosis and mind expansion. I read the Secret of the Ages and many other books. I think the Wisdom of the Ancients or the Ancient Secrets of the Master. I forget the other titles. Several Robert Collier Metaphysical Self Help Book. But I did not know until maybe 20 years after that that he was actually an ad man who wrote some of the most powerful sales letters of all time. And he wrote a how to book called the Robert Collier Letter Book.

Michael: Right.

Joe: I still remember finding that I was in Colleen's bookstore, which has been since closed in Houston, Texas, rummaging around, which is one of the things I love to do in bookstores. And there was this book called the Robert Collier Letter Book, the first edition, hardcover, faded yellow cover. And I looked at it and I said, is this the same guy?

Michael: Yeah.

Joe: Is this the guy who wrote the Secret of the Ages? And I took it up to the counter and I asked Colleen and she said, well, I don't know, but it could be. And as I researched, I found out it not only was, but he told the story of writing those books in The Robert Collier letter book.

Michael: Wow. Okay.

Joe: That book caused me to be transformed as a copywriter.

Michael: And when did you find that book?

Joe: I probably found it around 1980 somewhere in there. I can't be sure, but boy, I read that book numerous times. And because of even a passage, one passage that was in that book set me on a trail that ended up with me writing another book of mine called the Seven Lost Secrets of Success.

Michael: Okay, what was the passage in that book?

Joe: Robert Collier was talking about some sales letters he used to promote the Man Nobody Knows by an advertising writer by the name of Bruce Barton. And I read that, I read the letter and I said something about the book has been a death bestseller. And I kept thinking, who is Bruce Barton? What is this book? Something just. It planted a seed in me and it wouldn't let go.

Michael: Who was he?

Joe: Bruce Barton was the founder, co founder of bbdo, Batten, Barton, Durston and Osborne, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: He was a best selling author in 1925, 1926. He was a congressman. He was almost as well known during that time period as David Ogilvy was in the 60s and 70s. And I ended up writing the Seven Lost Secrets of Success, the only book on Bruce Barton Advertising Method, all because of the Robert Collier letter book.

Michael: Was the book the man that Nobody Knows, a book about his life?

Joe: No, it was about Jesus as a marketing person.

Michael: Really? And that was written by Bruce Barton?

Joe: It was written by Bruce Barton. It's still in print.

Michael: Really?

Joe: The Man Nobody Knows was a sellout in 1925. Number one best seller in 1926. An edited, washed down version is still in print today, but it was one of the first books about Jesus as a salesperson.

Michael: Pretty good book.

Joe: Very much so, because it's a very different look at what we've been hearing about for the longest time.

Michael: And when he wrote it, was he already in his prime as an advertising man?

Joe: Oh, yes, he was very famous. In fact, they probably put a lot of their advertising muscle behind making the book a bestseller because it brought in a lot of clients and traffic to BBDO. Everybody would call and say, we want Bruce Barton to do our copy. They hired a whole lot of Bruce Bartons to do it.

Michael: So your book, what was the title again?

Joe: 7 Lost Secrets of Success.

Michael: That was about Bruce Barton.

Joe: That was about Bruce Barton and his advertising marketing method.

Michael: Okay, that's great. So tell me about that book. Were you successful with it?

Joe: Very successful with it. That's another one of those things where I was obsessed with learning About Bruce Barton, I pushed aside a lot of projects. I went on this two year quest to learn everything I could. I found out who owned a copyright to his materials. I went to the University of Wisconsin, looked at the hundred some boxes of his diaries and his office papers and his ad that were left to the university. I did all of this research and self published the book. And it did so well. It's now in its 11th edition. One person liked it so much, he bought 19,500 copies of it and gave it to everybody that was in his company. And that book still in print? When people buy my Nightingale Conant program, the Power of Outrageous Marketing, that book comes with it.

Michael: Wow. Okay. Who owns the rights to all that information? The university?

Joe: No, he gave the rights to everything he had created to the. Let me see if I get the name right. The New York Institute for the Disabled. He had a daughter who was disabled. She lived in a wheelchair. In fact, she died by drowning. Her wheelchair slid off into a pool and she drowned. And to help the disabled, he gave all of his rights, everything, to this institute in New York. And they had given me permission to use a lot of his work in my book.

Michael: So you were able to go through all his archival stuff in boxes and just. That's great.

Joe: Yeah, I did. I had a blast doing it. It's still a book. That's from my heart.

Michael: Was it your first big success as far as a writing project, as far as your book?

Joe: It probably was. I had written Zen in the Art of Writing. I wrote Turbocharger writing. I think I wrote the AMA Complete Guide to Small Business Advertising for the American Marketing Association. I think all those came before the Lost Secrets book. So, yeah, the Lost Secrets was probably my biggest success at that point.

Michael: Let me ask you, you see, in a book, first printing, second printing, third printing, is there a standard in the printing of books of how many runs or is it totally subjective?

Joe: That's a good question. It's subjective that first printing could have been 100 books. Most likely it's around 5,000 books. But that is not absolute in any way.

Michael: Right, right. Especially today because there's so many short run printers.

Joe: Yeah, there's short run printers that'll do one copy of a book or 50 copies, or 100 or a thousand. So there's no way to know. You know what that means without that book.

Michael: Let's talk about. You get a book like that and you get that many copies out, what does that do for your business?

Joe: On the first level, it makes me famous. There are people who write to me who I would never have heard of. I mean, geez, how do I explain this? Well, I remember when I was still living in Houston, I got a fax one day from Germany and this guy wrote this letter to me and faxed it to me. That said, I just finished reading the seven Lost Secrets of Success. I think it is the greatest self improvement book ever written for business people since Think and Grow Rich. I had no idea where he got my book. And so somehow, by having a book that has that many copies out there and that much publicity, Success magazine reviewed it and many other magazines reviewed, goes out there and touches people and touches lives in ways the author never knows.

Michael: Right.

Joe: But when they do come to me or they find me now online or something like that, there is so much respect and so much prepaid selling that I don't have to do anything but answer the phone or answer the email and I'm hired.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. That's great. And then how soon after did you start getting obsessed with P.T. Barnum?

Joe: I wrote Cyberwriting, which was one of the first Internet marketing books, and I think I wrote that in 94 or 95. And AMICOM, which is the American Management association publishing division, came out with that book. And they wanted to know what else I had that I could write. And I had kicked around doing a story or something on P.T. Barnum. So I wrote and said, well, I'd like to do something on PT Barnum. They so quickly jumped, but with offering me an advance that it staggered me.

Michael: Can you share with it what maybe a guy thinking about getting into the writing business could make on an advance?

Joe: Oh, advances. Gosh, Advances for books these days are everything from nothing to quarter of a million dollars. Okay, the quarter of a million dollars goes to the Stephen Kings and the, you know, the Dean Koons and maybe Deepak Chopra and some of the ones that are already established as best sellers. You don't hear about those too often.

Michael: Now with AMACOM, were you. Were you tied up within a contract with them to do writing for them?

Joe: My contract said they had the first chance, the first vote on my next book. Okay, so in other words, whatever it was, I would give them the first look at it. If they passed on it, I can go anywhere I want it. So I told them about my PT Barnum idea and they loved it. And they immediately said, well, we'd like to have you do it. They made an advance, which is nothing to brag about. It was like five grand or something like that, which is still pretty good in terms of what's out there. You know, when I did the AMA advertising book, they offered me nothing, right? And I ended up getting more because of some negotiating, but they started with zero pretty bad. So, anyway, I really wanted to do the book on P.T. Barnum. I had read part of his autobiography and fell in love with his charm and his cleverness. And I realized that he was probably one of the greatest marketing geniuses of early America. And he's an overlooked genius. And people even remember him for the wrong reasons. Like they think Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. And he never said that. He didn't write that. He didn't say that. He didn't think that. That wasn't his attitude to people at all. So I wanted to correct a lot of the misconceptions. I wanted to pay respect to him, and I thought it would be a hoot to do the book. And so, yeah, sometime after doing the Lost Secrets and after doing cyber writing and seeing how enthused AMACOM was, I signed on to do There's a Customer Born Every Minute, my book on P.T. Barnum.

Michael: When you have a deal with a publisher like that, can you give an example of what kind of arrangement, financial arrangement, it ends up being if you have a success? What do you make on a book? What does the publisher make on a book? Yeah, well, I guess you don't have to get into details.

Joe: There's good news and bad news with all of this. I mean, I really wanted to be published with amicom. I really wanted them to get behind my book and sell it. I really wanted to do the Barnum book, and I really wanted to make good money doing it. And they are a traditional conservative publisher. So what they typically, and most publishers typically do this is they offer you an advance, which could be nothing to, you know, several thousand to a lot of thousands. Typically, you get half of it when you sign the contract. You get the other half of it when you turn in a book, they accept. And then from then on out, you earn royalties after they've earned back what they've already paid you as an advance. So the royalties are negotiable, but are rarely above 10% of the selling price of the book. Now, I say good news and bad news. I am very glad that I was published by them. That book ended up being a best seller at Amazon. I got on national television with it. A & E did a nationally syndicated biography of Barnum. And at the end of it, they only held up one book, recommended one book.

Michael: And.

Joe: So a lot of Good things like that came from it. But in terms of money, I was making pennies. So the credibility I can take to the bank by doing some of my own marketing. But in terms of royalties, that is nothing to brag about.

Michael: So then maybe sometimes, and if you're a good copywriter and you can write and sell anything, you can be your own self publisher.

Joe: Well, this way I am now at this point, I won't go to another publisher again unless they really do offer a lot of money up front in a better advance because, for example, I have a dozen or more ebooks at this point. I have made far, far, far more money with my ebooks than I ever did with my Nightingale program or any of my publishing work. The ebooks are making me rich and in some ways famous.

Michael: Let's talk about ebooks. Do people really read those things?

Joe: You know, Mark Joyner came to me about three years ago. He's the president of ESOP Marketing in LA. And he kept saying, give me a book of yours and I'll put it online as an ebook and I'll sell it and we'll split the profit. He came to me for two years. This shows you how much of a futurist I am because I kept turning him down. I kept saying, nobody is going to buy an E book. I am a bookaholic. I'm sitting in my library right now. I've got 5,000 books all around me. I don't read ebooks. I'm not going to write one. Nobody's going to buy them. So he stayed after me for almost two years.

Michael: Was he already successful in selling ebooks?

Joe: Yeah, he had an E book of his own that had been downloaded something like a million times. So he had something, and I don't remember if that was sold or if it was given away or whatever, but you know, he was doing fairly well. He was a nice guy and he seemed to be doing pretty good with his business. I just wasn't convinced it was worth my time. Finally I said, look, I got an old book called Hypnotic Writing. I used to sell it in the back of the room with my talks. I've never published it. It's not online. I don't even do anything with it anymore. And I quit speaking except for exclusive engagement. So take that. He took Hypnotic Writing. He put up a website called hypnoticwriting.com. he wrote a sales letter for it. And that sales letter was so good. I read that letter and I wanted to buy my own book. That's how good it was. Overnight there were like 600 orders for a $30 ebook.

Michael: Wow.

Joe: That was overnight. Since then we've sold tens of thousands.

Michael: Of them of the hypnotic writing.

Joe: Hypnotic writing alone. Hypnotic writing alone. And again, that's an ebook. We're not printing anything, we're not fulfilling anything, we're not shipping anything. It's as automated as you can get because people read the sales letter, it's already on the website, they click to pay. The credit card transaction is all automated. They are automatically given a download site, they download it on their own, then they don't have to talk to anybody.

Michael: Right. How did Mark Joyner, did he have an existing list that he sent the sales letter out too?

Joe: Yes, he had an existing list at the time and I have no idea how big it was at that point a couple years ago. Today his list is over a million, a half a million names.

Michael: Wow.

Joe: He's got 60,000 affiliates and a half a million people on his mailing list. And it's probably much more than that. That was the number I heard, geez, maybe a year ago. So it's probably far more than that.

Michael: Let's talk about the book, Hypnotic Writing. Tell me, tell me about it.

Joe: Hypnotic writing was something I wrote intentionally for a back of the room sale when I was still speaking and teaching writing classes in Houston. It's one of those things where you know, anybody who's heard about speaking or done any speaking knows that if you've got anything to sell, they're going to buy it right then and there because they want to take home more of you.

Michael: Right.

Joe: If you did. Well, if they like you, they want to buy your books, your videos, your CDs, anything you get.

Michael: Right?

Joe: Well, I had a couple books at that point, but I thought, well, I want a higher ticket item. So I wrote this thing called hypnotic writing, which I think was 120 pages. Had some, excuse me, no problem. Had some fun chapters in there like Milton Erickson's techniques for writing and gosh, I don't even remember them all. I haven't looked at the book in a long time.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: But it was like 100 and some pages and I printed it out once inside only spiral bound gave it a cool title. Hypnotic Writing gave it a pretty powerful subtitle. Something like 20 chapters that will supercharge your writing so that you can easily and effortlessly write books and articles and news releases and blah blah, blah. And I put a $50 price tag on it. And in my talks I would say, and I also have this book which you can't get anywhere else. It's privately printed, costs 50 bucks, but you can have it here today for 30 bucks. So they felt like they got a deal, and I walked away with a lot of money.

Michael: That's great. How long were you doing the present, the group speaking presentations where you're selling product in the back of the room and stuff?

Joe: I did it in Houston for 10 years.

Michael: Wow.

Joe: There was an adult education facility called Leisure Learning still there.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: And I started teaching probably in the early 80s, and I did it as a way to help sell some of my books.

Michael: Okay. Kind of like the Learning Annex.

Joe: Exactly. Very much exactly like that. And it helped make me famous in Houston. When I first started, I only had two or three people in a class. And by the time I was finishing 10 years later, they had to get bigger rooms, and the classes were sold out to the extent that we'd have to divide them up and do two or three versions of the same class. So they really prospered. Word of mouth did fantastic. I got a lot of promotions, and again, I think on some level, it made me famous in Houston.

Michael: That's great. I'm looking at your website, and for anyone who wants to go to your website, you probably have several, but I'm looking at the one. www.mrfire.com is that going to give somebody a pretty good idea of all the products and things you have?

Joe: Yeah. That's a portal to everything I've done. First of all, @mrfire.com there are dozens of free articles on copywriting, on advertising, on publicity, my thoughts about marketing, excerpts from my book. That's all there for free.

Michael: It's excellent. It's a beautiful site.

Joe: Oh, thank you.

Michael: And I was reading a little bit about your site designer. Who did that for you.

Joe: Yeah. Charles Lewis.

Michael: How long have you had this site up?

Joe: Well, the site's been up since 95, but in this renewed version and everything, it's only been up about a year.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: It was kind of a plain vanilla one for the first year or two.

Michael: Now, where'd Mr. Fire come from?

Joe: That was a nickname that was given to me back in Houston because sometimes I got so excited, so passionate about what I was talking about. They said I was a fiery speaker. And then it just led to somebody saying, oh, he's Mr. Fire. And then that became my nickname. And then when I went on a website, well, it just seemed like everybody would misspell Vitaly, but they wouldn't misspell Mr. Fire.

Michael: Right.

Joe: So we went.

Michael: Tell me about your library. You got 5,000 books around you?

Joe: Yeah. I have one of the largest collections of marketing books in the world. I also have one of the largest collections of metaphysical books. So I have a foot in both of these worlds. I very much love the old masters. There are a lot of old books on marketing and advertising that are mostly forgotten.

Michael: Tell me your five favorite. You've already given me Robert Collier letter book, but I'm sure you've got a couple stashed away that you don't tell anybody about.

Joe: Well, let's see. I may have to walk over and look at some of those.

Michael: For one that pops out in your head, as far as just a real gold mine, I've always loved the work.

Joe: By Charles Austin Bates.

Michael: Who is he?

Joe: Charles Austin Bates was a copywriter at the turn of the century. He actually worked in New York City around 1901 to 1905. Somewhere in there, he wrote several books. There's even a set of books. These are very hard to find. And I think they're called the Art and Literature of Business.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: He did something that was really ahead of its time. I mean, it's something you'd see Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy doing today. But he did a book called the Tailoring Book, and I think that was in 1905, and it was nothing but a hardbound collection of ads that tailors could buy and use.

Michael: Wow.

Joe: It was like a swipe file.

Michael: Do you have that one?

Joe: I have that, yes.

Michael: What's it called?

Joe: I believe it's called the Tailoring Book. That one's called the Tailoring Book. And it's all four tailors, and there's nothing but ads in there that he either wrote or he found that worked. And the tailors would buy the book and then they would have ads that they can go and run.

Michael: That's wonderful.

Joe: So there's stuff like that. I'm a very big fan of John Caples, and a lot of people don't know that he wrote five or six books. And I've got all of his books, including autographed one. In fact, I found. He taught an advertising course in 1950. And I found his handouts.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: Which are at the Smithsonian Institute.

Michael: Did you find him there?

Joe: It's all. All of his materials, like Bruce Bartons, were donated to the University of Wisconsin. John Capel's widow donated all of his files, his diaries, his manuscripts to the Smithsonian Institute.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: And they're sitting on a shelf in the back. You'd have to go there and ask for them and do research like I did.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: But it's all there was.

Michael: John Caples. Did he have other books on different subjects besides how to write copy and advertising?

Joe: No, he only had that on those on writing advertising and copy.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: How to Write Advertising that Sells by Clyde Bedell is always been one of my favorites.

Michael: Right.

Joe: And if you want to know the book that influenced John Caples the most, which also influenced me, it's called Advertising Copy by George Hotchkiss.

Michael: Okay. That influenced John Caples.

Joe: Yep. John Caples openly says in one of his diary entries that he came up with the idea for his famous ad on. What was the ad on? THEY LAUGH When I sat down at the piano when I started to play. He got the idea from that by reading Advertising Copies, the book by George Hotchkiss.

Michael: And who was George Hotchkiss?

Joe: As far as I know, he was a copywriter in 1920.

Michael: Okay.

Joe: And this book came out in 1925. I just reached over and picked it up and he dedicated it. George Burton Hotchkiss was president professor of Business English and chairman of the Department of Advertising and Marketing at New York University. This book came out in 1924, and he dedicated it to the anonymous copywriter.

Michael: What do you think it is about these advertising men back in the turn of the century, in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, that make them so valuable compared to our modern times of today?

Joe: Well, I think the number one thing is they work harder. They worked harder, I think, as if they're still alive. They worked harder. I think way too many people that are doing copywriting today or even writing the how to books on how to do copywriting today are maybe not frivolous, but not real deep. These guys, the early boys, John Caples and David Ogilvy even and Bruce Barton and George Hotchkiss, they wrote material that thoroughly taught you how to do copywriting. And I think it was Claude Hopkins with his scientific advertising, who said that he worked harder than any other advertising person he knew.

Michael: Yes, he did say that.

Joe: And I think that was one of his secrets to success. Caples and these other boys were all the same way. So when they wrote their book, they were very, very thorough. There was nothing like a statement like, write a good headline. Many people that are writing books today will just tell you, write a good headline that doesn't tell you anything. John Cables will tell you 50 ways to write a good headline.

Michael: Right.

Joe: You know, and explore what a good headline looks like.

Michael: Right.

Joe: So I think that was the real difference here. They worked harder. They were more persistent, they were more thorough.

Michael: Any other masters that really aren't well known to us in the direct, you know, direct marketing industry that you found is real gems as far as writing and copywriting.

Joe: Yeah. Kenneth Goode, G O O D E Wrote a whole lot of books back in the 30s. There was one of my favorites. Oh, I almost never tell people about this one. This is a real giveaway here, a real million dollar tip.

Michael: Who is he?

Joe: Kenneth Goode was a copywriter probably in the early 30s, and I couldn't tell you too much more than that. He co authored a lot of books like Profitable Showmanship and Showmanship in Business. But the book I'm thinking of that he wrote by himself is called How To Turn People into Gold. How to Turn People into Gold. I've always loved that title and I've always loved that book.

Michael: That is great.

Joe: And what he talks about are these fundamentals of human nature that have never changed. And this is something that I talk about from time to time in my talks and in my book. And I'll say that human nature has never changed. I've been researching ancient Roman history recently because my heritage is from there. And I'm going to be going there and doing some research and I'm finding that they had the same emotions. They had the same emotions, they responded to the same appeal. And how to Turn People into Gold by Goode is where he talks about these hot buttons in people and that if you do push these hot buttons in your copy or in your marker, you can turn these people into gold because they're going to buy from you.

Michael: Absolutely. How about, you know, you know, back in the Roman days, are there any. Have you researched like some really old writings on business and stuff like that? Maybe Besides in the 1900s, but even further back, anything impressive that you.

Joe: That's a wonderful question too. I'm just beginning to go that far back. I'm probably going to have to learn how to read Latin or Italian to do it in the most thorough way. But I remember just recently I was reading a book called the Golden Milestone, which is a whole book on Italian contributions from ancient civilization till today. In ancient Roman times, Romans would make soap and they sold it to the Romans as soap. So when they tried to sell it to the Germans, the Germans didn't believe in bathing, so they didn't buy soap. And the Romans just reframed it and said that it was a laxative. And what you would do is eat was the same product, but they reframed it for the market. And I thought this was brilliant. This was 2,500 years ago.

Michael: What magazines do you subscribe to and read avidly?

Joe: Oh, not as many as I used to. They're actually. They're more health oriented and magic oriented because I'm also an amateur magician. Most of my material and most of my work these days is all online. So I'll subscribe to Ezine and I'll read newsletters and things like that online. And I'll get bobbleized materials. He's a great copywriter. He's written great books. I highly recommend those. Or Dan Kennedy's. No BS Newsletter. Get that online Jay Abraham stuff. He's always cranking out things.

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Joe: So that kind of stuff I always. It comes to me by the by way of the computer.

Michael: Okay, excellent. Hey, I think we're at about an hour of talking. You've given me an incredible amount of information. I don't want to steal too much of your time away.

Joe: This has been great.

Michael: Yeah, it has been great. I really, really appreciate it. And what I'm going to do, I will get this up on the site and hidden place for you to listen to. And I think you've given a lot and I really want to thank you for your time. It's been an honor.

Joe: It's been fun. Would you get things that you hadn't heard before?

Michael: Oh, absolutely.

Joe: Okay.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. And hey, maybe if we, you know, down the road, if we want to fine tune it and do, you know, a session number two, we can do that if you're open to it.

Joe: Oh, I'm very open to it. It was fun to do it. Yes. Great question.

Michael: Hey, I really appreciate it and I will be in touch with you. All right, everybody, here is another bonus resource for you, and it's about a section on my site that has about 15 hours of audio interviews with copywriting experts, including Brian Keith Voiles, including Carl Galetti, including Eugene Schwartz. You will not find this content anywhere. It will take you to an entire collection of audio recordings, MP3 downloads, and transcripts of some of my best interviews on the subject of copywriting. And you will be able to play them, download them, print the transcripts, and it's a collection you will not find anywhere else. If you want an education on copywriting, you will not find anything better than this.