The Online Copywriter's Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Write Electronic Copy That Sells [Paperback]

I really enjoyed The Copywriter's Handbook and was looking forward to hearing what Bly had to say about writing for the web. I'm a professional writer and I write primarily for digital media, so I was interested in seeing how Bly's strategies, which are usually framed in terms of print outreach, could be applied to web environments.

Maybe I was naive to hope that an ink-and-paper book could keep up with a fast-moving digital medium, but Bly is usually good at capturing those timeless rules of good communication. I hoped that's what I would find in this book, but I was deeply disappointed.

Embarrassingly basic and outdated, it's written as though the audience is a collection of elderly dodderers still struggling to figure out how to use a mouse. Any book on web writing that begins by explaining what a hyperlink is is not pitched at a human in the 21st century, let alone a competent writer looking to improve.

The author's seeming unawareness of fairly standard web technologies is frustrating, and it also affects the quality of the advice given. As an example, Bly advises against using splash pages on a site because they become tiresome to returning visitors. But it's very easy to solve this problem by personalizing the user experience, so new visitors see the splash page and returning visitors are ushered directly to the homepage.

The book is plumped with a lot of filler information not specifically relevant to the web. Proofreading your copy, eliminating sexist language, avoiding overly technical writing, and "showing instead of telling" are all smart things to do, but they're concepts that any writer in any medium will be familiar with already.

I lost confidence in this book within 30 pages, and ended up barely skimming the rest of the contents. From now on, for meaningful insights into writing for digital media, I'll be sticking to savvy online research organizations such as MarketingExperiments.com and MarketingSherpa.com.

I purchased this book for work. It gives a good foundation in general copywriting and lots of information on writing for online audiences.

But I only gave it three stars because I wanted to know more of the "why". For example, why write shorter paragraphs online than in print? The author doesn't spend much time answering those questions I had. It was disappointing because I was really hoping to learn what was different about online copywriting, in order to improve my existing skills. If you need a basic copy book, this is a decent one (it just wasn't what I needed).

I've read many books in this segment and I would strongly recommend reading Hot Text: Web Writing that Works or Networds. Robert Bly is a "print guy" that thought it would be interesting to write a book on electronic copy. I would say that the first half of the book is written by supposed experts in on-line marketing. The book is crowded with all sorts of references to other people's work. This leads to a very choppy style of reading in my opinion. The author uses case studies from work that he has already completed but rarely does the content match the electronic world. For a book that is written in 2003, the data is incredibly dated. The author is comfortable with using data from 1996 in a book that talks about the ever changing environment of On-Line marketing. Most of the data regarding internet statistics was incredibly dated. The author talks about the principals of good copy writing but rarely goes into any depth with regards to examples of the principals. I found the writing to be lazy to say the least. Clearly this author is capitalizing on the interest of electronic copy. Take out the experts that know about on-line marketing, you're left with an incredibly weak book. Although there are is a lot of expert reference, rarely do the experts go into any depth with regards to their arguments or points. If this book is the only book that you are exposed to within this segment; you might be left thinking that you read an average book. When you compare the book to other books in the same segment, it simply doesn't compare. Not a good book.