Copywriting.org Interviews Shel Horowitz
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Q1. Where are you from?
Grew up in the Bronx. Live in Western Massachusetts since 1981.
Q2. How did you discover copywriting?
In the 1980s, I started reading books by people like Jeffrey Lant and Melvin Powers. Those and others turned me from a “we, we, we all the way home” wannabe to a copywriter who focuses on the benefit to the reader and not how great the client is.
Q3. What forms of copy do you write?
Press releases, book cover copy, web page copy, instructional materials, and yeah, the occasional sales email or ad. I mostly serve businesses/authors/nonprofits who want to combine environmental and social good with profitability. I’ve also written eight books on marketing, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World: Combining Principles and Profit to Create the World We Want (one of my two books in the Guerrilla series, both nominally co-authored by Guerrilla Marketing founder Jay Conrad Levinson). My first major book on marketing was Marketing Without Megabucks: How to Sell Anything on a Shoestring, way back in 1993—pre-Internet!
Q4. What are your favorite niches to write in?
Social change, green business, microbusinesses, solopreneurs, authors
Q5. What is the #1 lesson you've learned as a copywriter?
Make it about them–and not just their pain points but their aspirations. A lot of my copy is focused on the positive.
Q6. Who is your favorite copywriter & why?
Drew Kaplan’s DAK catalogs, because he made you feel his passion. I would lust after everything in those pages, even stuff that was absolutely useless to me—just because he wrote like a kid in a candy store, brimming with enthusiasm. And it wasn’t uncommon for me to buy an item or two.
Q7. Do you have any recent wins to share?
The thing I’m most proud of is starting the activist mass movement that saved a local mountain while all the “experts” were telling me it was impossible, there was nothing we could do. I wrote most of the marketing messages in a campaign that even I thought would take five years—but we won in just over a year. I credit a lot of our victory to the mindset that we *would* win.
That was not so recent. But it led me to think about how I’d used all the lessons I’d learned in a long marketing career to achieve that victory, and maybe there were some things from the activist world that could be applicable to business. And that led me directly to this niche of profitable environmental and social good. I think I’ve been one of the people who has helped to shape the conversations in the business world, that this idea is becoming mainstream. Not ready to declare victory yet. It’s been a long, slow process and there’s still a lot farther to go. But I have been to conferences with Fortune 50 companies who were touting their achievements in this area, and that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.
My TEDx, “Impossible is a Dare: Business for a Better World”, is a good short summary of this journey (as it existed at the time), including more about how we saved that mountain as well as the advantages to business of profitably addressing things like hunger, poverty, racism, and even war and the climate crisis: https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 (move your mouse to “event videos”)
That was not so recent. But it led me to think about how I’d used all the lessons I’d learned in a long marketing career to achieve that victory, and maybe there were some things from the activist world that could be applicable to business. And that led me directly to this niche of profitable environmental and social good. I think I’ve been one of the people who has helped to shape the conversations in the business world, that this idea is becoming mainstream. Not ready to declare victory yet. It’s been a long, slow process and there’s still a lot farther to go. But I have been to conferences with Fortune 50 companies who were touting their achievements in this area, and that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.
My TEDx, “Impossible is a Dare: Business for a Better World”, is a good short summary of this journey (as it existed at the time), including more about how we saved that mountain as well as the advantages to business of profitably addressing things like hunger, poverty, racism, and even war and the climate crisis: https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 (move your mouse to “event videos”)
Q8. What would you say to a prospective client who wants to hire you?
If you’re using business to achieve social and environmental progress, globally or locally, you’ve just found a copywriter, idea guy, and marketing/profitability strategist who gets it. Someone who can see both the forest and the trees, who can help you get out of any silos you’re stuck in, who can connect the dots and see convergences and suggest symbiotic win-win-win product and partnership possibilities others might miss.
Q9. What is a good email address for prospective clients to contact you?
shel@greenandprofitable.com