Delightfully revolting & offensive copywriting influences

An inquiring mind thinks she wants to know: === I hope you're well. I signed up for your emails and am getting in touch today because I've been asking all the writers I truly respect who their copywriting heroes are, for a programme I'm building, and three separate people included you in their lists. I figured I must be late to the party! I'd love to know, who are your writing heroes? 3 - 5 people would be awesome. === I could have given my usual suspects I admire & have learned a lot from: i.e., Kennedy, Halbert, Furey, Bencivenga, Schwartz, McCarthy, etc etc etc But I suspect they’d mostly already been covered by others she’d asked. Instead, following are some non “copywriters.” Several are despised and hated... but all of their work has in some way influenced my copywriting & marketing wiles over the last couple decades — whether it’s emails, sales letters, content creation (books, courses, podcast, video, whatever) or otherwise. Here goes in no particular order: 1. Roissy — of the old Chateau Heartiste fame, and the heavyweight champion of the world at creating writing that is absolutely despised by his enemies while loved by his fans. 2. Frank Miller — comicbook writer & artist who single-handedly saved Batman from being cancelled in the 1980s, with his far more brutal “Dark Knight Returns” version of the character hated by many-a-fanboy with a seething passion today. 3. Alfred Hitchcock — not a writer but certainly an “author” of his films, and the book “The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” is absolutely required reading — multiple times — for anyone in marketing, in my opinion. He was also being #metoo’ed decades before slander-ridden Medium articles were a thing. 4. Vox Day — novelist, blogger, & builder of his own platforms like no other, who is literally banned from Google’s offices, and whose insights & discoveries have been ripped off without attribution for decades. For example, if you see people running around talking about or publishing social media listicles about "Sigma" males, they are almost certainly bastardizing & completely misinterpreting his work on the socio-sexual hierarchy from as far back as 2010. 5. Arnold Murray — the late, extremely controversial pastor who is probably despised by more Christians than he is by anyone else... and who built arguably the world’s largest non-denomination church (“beamed” into 30 million homes each day for nearly 30 years) out of a converted roller rink in a jerk water town using just daily content, solid direct response marketing, and strategically buying TV air time. 6. Chuck Dixon — the #1 most prolific comicbook writer (more prolific even than Stan Lee) who has written just about every character you’ve ever heard of at one time or another — from The Punisher and Batman to SpongeBog and Raggedy Ann & Andy and even adapting The Hobbit. 7. RazorFist — the political prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of of our time, whose freakishly effective way of communicating is like anti-leftist poetry… especially when he talks about current events, culture war tactics, platform creation, calling out hypocrisy, documenting corruption, and all-other things options for thinking differently from politics & law to movies & books. There are lots more. But many of the above particular writers/communicators especially revolt & repel certain people, while attracting others just as strongly. And going by some of their trolls & haters they are like that painting of Kramer in Seinfeld: They come off to many of those trolls as offensive, loathsome brutes. But they still can’t look away… A good goal to have when it comes to writing to sell & persuade. Especially if you want to make absolutely sure people are paying attention to you... One way to do that is with the wise use of email subject lines. There are 1000s of ways to write subject lines that do this. I cover some of my favorite, with examples, in the book I give to new paying Email Players newsletter subscribers. More on that here: []( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2024 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA