We continue this week with our third and final part in interview master marketer and Write Way Newsletter subscriber John Bejakovic.

And this is the point in the interview where we hit the straight up writing stuff.

I quiz John on how he wove the book together into a coherent whole…

…copywriting techniques that apply to fiction and content writing…

…how to gather and recall stories, facts and interesting tidbits…

…and how to use a daily email habit to build your book piece by piece.

We also touch on AI, reading and other things on the way.

A brief disclaimer before we begin.

I’ve fairly heavily edited this transcript, because let’s be honest…

…reading a conversation sucks.

Pasting transcripts in can work if they’re short, or the speaker is naturally eloquent (unlike me) but boy howdy does it hurt mine head to read if otherwise.

So what I’ve done here is attempt to marry the material of the transcript with the style and energy of the Write Way you know and love.

Call it an amplified transcript.

If you want the full, unfiltered, unedited conversation with all the questions included?

Well, there’s a chance to get that down at the end of this email.

But without further ado

Interview with a Bejako

Part three of three

James Carran:

One of the things you just mentioned…

Editor’s note: See WWN60 : Make sales, not scams if you’re lost.

…is themes that run through the book.

But something I noticed is not so much a theme as different characters, or stories that pop up again and again.

As I started reading, you have ten commandments, there's ten chapters, there's a couple stories in each. It felt at first like a listicle kind of book.

Here's a thing,
and an unrelated thing,
and an unrelated thing.

(Number nine will SHOCK you.)

But then the more I got through it, around Commandment Seven, people start crossing over, and themes start crossing over, and it brought it all together, which I really liked.

Was that a deliberate, conscious thing when you were writing it, that you wanted to weave the threads right the way through, or is it just natural overlap?

John Bejakovic:

I think it's both.

For one thing, there is natural overlap.

Ultimately, these things all rely on human psychology and neurology. When you get down to the base of it, there are some fundamentals that get manifested in different ways.

So, the fact that, we all want to have our personal sovereignty respected, it's kind of a fundamental human need. But it gets manifested in different ways, and it can be addressed in different ways.

Another part of it is simply the craft of writing the book, where I didn't want it to read like a disconnected, disjointed listicle. Which, you're right, that's what it is, ten commandments.

One thing I definitely took from the copywriting world, is how the brain works in terms of

mental episodes.

There are clear boundaries, and we want to impose that structure on the world.

That can work in your favour, because it means at some point, people basically stop paying attention and you can sneak something in at the end of the boundary.

But it could also work against you, because when people get to the bottom of the page, if there's a period or the end of a paragraph, they'll say, "Perfect, I was ready to go to sleep anyhow, let me put the book down, I'll pick it up tomorrow."

But if you make sure that the paragraph runs onto the next page, then they flip the page, and then they have to read a third of the way down before the paragraph has ended?

Then they say, okay, let me just finish the next paragraph and they keep getting sucked in.

Another technique is the open loop that I talk about in the book. That’s a very conscious thing, saying, okay, this topic, we're going to talk more about later in the book…

…but right now, let me tell you about this other thing.

Then, when you get to later in the book, you can reference that earlier point. That very naturally ties together different parts of the book and gives a certain amount of coherence.

But it's also a pure copywriting strategy of simply sucking people further down that reading funnel, so that they'd never have that opportunity of saying, “I finished the first chapter, let me put the book down now,”

With a book, putting it down can be okay, because there's a certain level of investment in the book. People buy a book, people treat a book a certain way.

With a sales letter? If you put down a sales letter after the first two pages, and it's an eight-page sales letter, the odds are fantastic, you will never read it again. That kills the business.

So it's an important technique, and a worthwhile technique to bring over from the world of sales copywriting into non-fiction writing.

I mean, this is nothing new. Fiction writers, even including the very best fiction writers, use this technique all the time.

James:

I was thinking when you were saying that, there's a lot of Terry Pratchett books just behind me there. The number of times I thought as a kid “it's late, I'm tired, I'll just finish the chapter,” and I would be, 20, 30, 40 pages further in before I'd remember…

…Pratchett doesn't have chapters!

It’s part of his style, he never used chapter breaks, it's one continuous thing straight through. I got sucked in because I'm so used to having that closed door of the end of the chapter and stopping here, even if there's a hook. But Pratchett decided to just take away all the doors and have

open-plan writing!

Which, I guess, you probably just answered the next question too which is that most of my list (Editor’s note: That’s you, dear reader!) are not copywriters.

Like, I write copy when I need to, but that's not my focus.

So the question was:

What copywriting/marketing techniques do you think are worth bringing across to other forms of writing? What would be the one or two techniques that every content writer, ghostwriter, fiction or book writer should be at least familiar with?

John:

The open loop above, that is great. But, beyond that, I think the mindset of:

I could potentially lose this reader at any point.

The way I think about it is giving people IOUs.

Right at the beginning, you give them an IOU. You’re saying, "Okay, there's going to be something interesting, worthwhile, something fascinating, something beneficial, if you just keep reading."

And then, by the time that you've paid that off, you've given out a few more IOUs. So people are always holding something in their hand, saying, “I could leave, but I'm going to lose out on these three pieces of paper that are promising me some stuff,” until the very end.

I think that's one, that mindset that you can lose readers, and you should always consciously work on never having an empty space where you can lose readers.

The other thing is from the world of email marketing, and I think it's very relevant to the kinds of books that I've written, to all non-fiction books.

It's to turn it into a story.

A lot of people are experts in their field and they end up writing something that reads like a textbook or an encyclopedia. But that’s extremely hard to get through, and if people do get through it, they won't remember it. There is a fair chance that they won't even understand it as they're reading it.

That's not to say people are stupid.

It's not to say that people who write those kinds of books are dumb or bad writers.

It’s just going back to how the human brain works and what kinds of things we process.

There needs to be something. Some sort of a joke, some sort of a visual, some sort of an analogy or parable, that prepares people for the point that you want to make, and then, ideally, illustrates that same point with two or three other stories, parables, or pop culture illustrations.

I keep telling people that this book that I've written, it's very much in a similar genre to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I've taken a different big idea, let me talk about conmen and pickup artists. But ultimately it's how to communicate with people effectively, how to get your point across, how to persuade, how to have people like you instead of be irritated and disgusted by you.

Dale Carnegie's book, and my book as well, could ultimately fit on one piece of paper. It’s a bunch of very simple ideas like, smile, use people's names, and so on. While my book has certain things which might be a little bit more or less familiar, like that idea of agree and amplify. But those ideas are still nothing that’s impossible to summarise. I could write it all down on a single piece of paper.

But I don't think people would really get value out of that.

James:

Ezra Klein said something really interesting in an interview with David Perell recently.

As you know, the big thing at the moment is AI, and people were saying, "Oh, you can use CrapGPT to summarise the book for you, and then you save 12 hours."

Klein pointed out that, actually, that's not the point of a book.

The point of a book is not to give you the information as quickly as possible, otherwise you would do it in a short video clip. The point of a book is to spend time with the information, to spend time with thoughts. The 12 hours that you spend sitting and reading the book…

…Obviously, yours didn't take 12 hours to read…

…but even spending an hour sitting and reading that book versus reading an email that summarised it, that actually makes you think about it.

The trick is to keep the book interesting enough to focus people on the topic for long enough that they come to their own conclusions. The book is a concentration device, it's a way of forcing you to think about the same thing for a long period of time.

John:

I agree.

I have a habit of rereading books that I found very valuable. I always read with a notebook by me, and I'm taking notes of interesting ideas, and I write down my own observations, and it still happens that I’ll reread a book for the third time and discover something that I'd completely ignored or glossed over before.

The best analogy I have for that, or the best metaphor, is the parable of the sower.

The book is a seed, and your mind is the soil.

There is a time when a certain idea in that book is going to land on barren soil in your head, and nothing is going to grow there. But that same idea can land in a soil that's somehow changed over the course of a year or two years, and something magical sprouts out.

A valuable idea pops up that wasn't there before.

This has happened to me so many times that when people say, "Oh, yeah, you can read the Cliff's Notes,” or “I'm listening to this book on 2x on Audible" I think

"Good, I really don't know what you're going to get out of it, you know."

I get a lot out of books. Both the value I get out of them and for marketing content, and people are always asking me, "Where do you get ideas for the emails that you're writing?"

And the answer is that I read, but I read extremely slowly. Not by choice, I'm just a tortoise when it comes to reading. But it's served me well, because of exactly what you’re saying. You're thinking, you're taking time, and ideas pop up.

I think that’s what a book is really about.

James:

Naturally, again, not by choice, I read obscenely fast.

Inhumanly fast, according to some people. Friends or followers will say to me, “I wish I could read as fast as you can,”

…but I always think "No, I wish I could read as slow as you do."

Because I would like to just slow down and really take it in.

Yet again, you kind of answered the next question I had…

…which was that your books and emails are absolutely full of stories, facts, anecdotes, etc. There's always something interesting in there.

How do you find them all? And how do you remember them? Because I can read a ton of books and learn a ton of facts but then it’s finding and remembering the right one to illustrate the point.

John:

In terms of how do I find the stories, it's a lot of reading, a lot of research. I don't have kids, I have a lot of time to dedicate to just asking “what am I interested in, what can I do?”

That buys me a lot of space. In terms of how do I remember?

I have a very bad memory.

I had always wanted to be a fiction writer, and I think the reason I will never be a fiction writer is because I just have such a terrible memory. Nothing is really happening in my head most of the time and I don't think you can write effective fiction by just collating notes that you've taken.

But that's, ultimately, what I do.

I take a huge quantity of notes. I have my own home-brewed system for organizing and processing those notes, I also keep journals that are specific to individual projects

This book had its own journal, a text file on my computer. Everything that was relevant to that project went in there and it became organized. Then I reviewed the journal saying “now I have this 200 pages of notes I've taken, and I have this structure that I've come up with, how can I work the notes into the structure?”

One final thing is my daily emails. I archive those on my site, and I use Wordpress categories and tags to organise them. Both of those have been very useful because I can go in and find certain emails that belong to categories, and I've forgotten, and I say, "Oh, that was kind of interesting, I can use that in the book."

Or with tags, sometimes I search just for a specific name of somebody. Like you say, I’ve written literally thousands of these daily emails and in every one I try to have some sort of interesting story or tidbit. So I forced forced myself when I'm stuck to just start rereading emails from two, three years ago.

As I do that, I’ll see a story that wasn't necessarily, it's not necessarily about conmen or pickup artists, but maybe it'll set something on fire in my mind, and maybe I can use it in this book in a way that I hadn't thought of. Because, again, my associative working memory isn't good enough to be, like,

"Oh, I've written 3,000 emails, I remember one from three years ago, which is on a completely random topic, but it could tie in very nicely to this."

But, if I see it, then I know it, and I can say, "Oh, okay." I have that very short span of time when I say, "Okay, this could work."

And then I write it down, and then it goes into the book.

James:

There's something about your emails that do lend themselves to that.

I love Daniel Throssell and Ben Settle's emails, but neither of them could do the same thing, where they draw out chunks of the emails and use it in a book in the same way because it's a very different style.

Was that a conscious decision to write in this style because you can reuse it, or was it just something naturally evolved from how you like to write?

John:

I think it's natural.

It's actually suboptimal from an email marketing perspective. If you have a Ben Settle-style business, you want to go in and be as personal and as disposable as possible.

You want the emails to feel like they were just dashed off right now, and that they're kind of stream-of-consciousness. Both Ben and Daniel are very, very good writers and very good at what they do, in terms of email.

Daniel is more in this way of taking trivial events from his life and building an email out of that in a very good way. I think that gives readers a feeling like they're really living Daniel's life alongside him, which is nice for people who want that.

But it’s a problem if you want to make a book that has some sort of independent life, that might be interesting to people who aren't already big fans. It’s harder to take an email about some cute thing that your kids said today and to really make that into a worthwhile part of a book chapter.

For me?

A) I already live a really boring life, and
B) I don't have that many cute stories from my life, and
C) I’m more resistant or reluctant to sharing that.

I do it, but it's not something that comes naturally, and I still feel resistance to doing it.

Also, I just find it boring after a while.

I find it boring to talk about things that I know and that happened to me. So I write about things that are interesting to me, the things that I read, things that have nothing to do with me, things that I learned, and that makes it so that ultimately, it's not about me.

Instead, it's something that I read that was interesting, so I can strip out the personal intro, and take that entire chunk or body of that email and plop it down inside of a book chapter, and it works.

James:

It's interesting that you say that about being boring for you, because I was thinking I've been on your list for over two years now. I joined in April 2023, and I have read every single email since then.

That's 812 emails, daily emails, plus some extras I signed up for.

So why don’t I get bored?

I love Ben and Daniel, they’re great writers but there are sometimes I think “ah, I'm not sure if I can be bothered” and maybe I’ll skim or start it or skip it… but I think I've read every single one of yours, I don't think I've ever looked and been, like, "Oh, John sent another email."

John:

Thank you, that's the best compliment I can get, so thank you.

And there endeth the lesson.

Or does it?

Because Bejako Baggins and I continued to discuss his email marketing ways…

…why I don’t get bored reading hundreds of his emails…

…how he maximises engagement with his list using some of the tactics from his book…

…and the marketing trap new email writers often fall into.

But I don’t want this series of interview to drag on so all that will remain unknown.

Unless you go and get the wonderful concentration device that is John’s book (in any format) and reply to this email with proof that you did so.

Do that before Sunday midnight your time, and I’ll reply post-haste with the link to the full discussion I had with John, including the bits I’ve skipped in this transcript.

Here’s the link to buy the book.

Meanwhile, may your pipe accompany many fine books and help you think many great thoughts,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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