I've just posted December's Maslen on Marketing article in The Sunfish Copywriting Library. It's called 21 short rules for better writing (and it might raise a smile).

You can read it - and all the other articles back to January 2006 - once you join. Membership is free and all you have to do is enter your first name and your email address, then proceed to the articles.

Join The Sunfish Copywriting Library.

Ah, Christmas approaches, and with it, the now traditional round-robin email promos. Here's a lovely one, from Habitat.

Dear all,

We would like to invite you to our 20% off Christmas shopping evening costumer event on Thursday 3^rd of December 6-9 pm at our Tottenham Court Road store.

Please print a copy of the attached voucher and present it at the store to receive 20% off on your purchase.

Please feel free to forward this offer to your family and friends.

Kind regards,

Habitat Corporate Sales

But what if you're not a "costumer? Can you still come? And loving that warm, personal Crimbo sign-off, too. Habitat Corporate Sales, eh? Warms the very cockles of me 'eart it does. (Thanks to Janis Thomas of FilmFlex Movies)

We all like to pretend we're not punctuation Nazis or whatever you call them. Tres relaxed about other people's misplaced apostrophes and the rest. But this? This is just plain wrong.

Finding something funny scrawled in magic marker on a greengrocer's market stall is one thing. Or even on a flip-chart outside a mobile phone shop - Managers Special - is a classic.

But to spend oodles of your marketing budget on a full-colour full-page ad and not having the wit to check it?

I'm not what you'd call a punctuation freak. If greengrocers want to advertise potato's good luck to 'em, I say. But when high-end car companies - and their advertising agencies - can't even get it right, I do feel a small sense of disappointment.

How to get the back you've never wanted

I think I’ve spotted a gap in the market for fitness equipment. The revelation came to me this morning as I completed a two-hour stint in the garden, double-digging a couple of hundredweight of horse manure into our impoverished flowerbeds. What the gym addicts of this country need is a digging machine. After all, what other piece of kit could fully stretch, pummel and – let’s be honest – comprehensively wreck so many muscles at one time?

True, there are cross-trainers, treadmills, rowers, not to mention the whole panoply of resistance machines, but these take such a piddling approach to hurting you. No. Today’s serious fitness freak deserves more. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the SpadeMaster.

The SpadeMaster heralds a new era in body conditioning technology. Its principal focus is the muscles of the back, particularly the lower back, so often ignored by more conventional machines. But it also devotes attention to other important muscle groups in the arms and legs.

Note the exercise programme settings options on the LCD control panel. How severe a workout do you want? You can opt for light, sandy, well drained soil: really only a beginner’s choice. Or, if you feel you need a more, how shall we say, demanding session, there are a number of settings to test even the most cardio-vascularly efficient body. Perhaps you’d like to try your hand at frozen clay. Or waterlogged peat. How about root-infested topsoil laid over hardcore? And for that unmistakeable, jarring impact, just touch the ‘half-brick-at-a-click’ icon. In early ‘field’ trials, users reported a satisfyingly juddering shock reaching from the ankle right up to the shoulder.

Using the principles of hydraulic resistance and some recently rediscovered techniques from the Office of the Inquisition, the SpadeMaster has been finely calibrated to do the greatest damage to your muscles using the maximum amount of your energy. The carbon-fibre boots anchoring you to the baseplate have been precision-engineered to produce unsustainable forces on your thigh muscles (and to rub agonisingly on your heels after a scant ten minutes). The adjustable telescopic shaft is precisely 15 cm too short, wherever you set your height on the dial. And, for that ultimate ‘real world’ feel, the handle is finished in a rewardingly smooth plastic, creating blisters almost before your workout has begun.

In order to replicate the authentic digging experience, the SpadeMaster has a built-in timer. Your minimum workout is 90 minutes although the alarm light has been programmed not to come on for a further 45 minutes, ensuring you’ll ‘feel the burn’ even at the entry level. However, we recommend that you begin with at least two hours, and remember not to stop for a break until it’s far, far too late.

Should your tastes extend to even greater verisimilitude, look no further than the SpadeMaster 3000 XL. In addition to the basic workout programmes and controls, the SpadeMaster 3000 XL provides a 3600 panoramic virtual reality workout environment. You can set the SpadeVision™ ergonomically designed headset for Sissinghurst, Gertrude Jekyll, Holland Park or Uncle Fred’s allotment. The Bluetooth-enabled wireless earphones enhance your routine with the clang of steel on flint, whilst the state-of-the-art nasal implants bring horse manure, rotting compost and, of course, part-buried catshit direct to your olfactory nerves.

All in all, the SpadeMaster – in both standard and 3000 XL variants – represents a dramatic leap forward in fitness technology. Look pityingly on your co-workers-out as they strain to achieve perfection. Dressed in a pair of old cords, a check shirt with a frayed ‘granddad’ collar, and your Nike Air Titchmarshes, you’ll draw nothing but envious glances. Accept their compliments as, one-by-one, the large sheets of muscle holding your back together go into spasm, leaving you with that ‘impossible-to-achieve’ spinal curvature gracing the covers of so many magazines. Listen, that’s Men’s Osteopathy calling your mobile.

Really happy to welcome Jo Kelly my fellow copywriter back into the fold at Sunfish. She's been working independently for the last few years as a comms consultant having co-founded Sunfish in 1996. Now she's back in harness with keyboard and quill pens at the ready.

New clients for us who are working with Jo include an arts publisher, an incubator website (start-ups not chicks) and a dining club.

Read more on our site at http://www.sunfish.co.uk/profile.htm

When it comes to pricing, most copywriters fall into one of two camps. Those who charge by the hour and those who charge by the job. I am one of the latter.

From the client's point of view, paying by the hour is bad news - and as a former client myself, I would never have hired a writer on this basis. Why?

Well, how long is your writer going to take? If they know before they have even started I would question their working methods. Some projects, superficially similar, take longer to write than others - how does your writer know which is which? So you're getting into an open-ended commitment to pay the final bill. Or are you? A few clients have asked me to work on an hourly rate but then say, "It's four hours' work." Now, how do they know? What they're doing is setting the fee for you.

From the copywriter's point of view, charging by the hour seems at first sight to be good news. After all, you get paid for all the time you put in. But consider this...

If you do repeated projects for the same client, I would expect you to get faster. It's called increasing your productivity. Let's say you're twice as fast. You're honest, so you're going to charge them half what you used to. Er, OK. So now you're a better writer than you used to be and you're charging half as much for the same job.

Charge by the project on the other hand and your client still pays the same amount for the same project. But now THEY get a better piece of copy and a fixed fee they can budget for, and YOU get an effectively higher rate for the job. Just be sure your writing IS better than it used to be! Of course you can come unstuck if a project takes longer than you thought it would ... but hey, them's the breaks.