4 Tips for Engaging Ad Copy from a Fantasy Writer

by Carlos Luis Delgado

Writing ad copy and fantasy fiction both require engaging stories.

Ad Copy and Epic Fantasy may be far distant cousins in the writing family tree, but working in either means you ask yourself daily: “how do I write more engaging stories?”

There’s good news from the kingdoms to the East: if you enjoy reading fantasy, sci-fi, or any genre fiction, you already have experience with the concept of immersion. All you have to do is apply it to your email — radio script, blog post, Facebook ad, etc.

Immersive writing helps both your Epic Fantasy novel and commercial script capture and hold your readers’ attention. You probably have read somewhere it takes a reader roughly 20 seconds to decide the value of a text. This is why engaging lines and hooks are front-loaded, which can range from kitschy to even shocking. This alone won’t keep an audience engaged the whole way. A catchy opening combined with immersive writing ensures your reader has been hooked and reeled to the end of your piece.

Let’s take a look at 4 ways immersion is used in fiction.

1. The five W’s of wizardry. Remember when your second grade Language Arts teacher, Miss Fitzgerald, spent that unseasonably warm September morning introducing you to the five W’s? Probably not, since she’s not a real person. But see how covering who, what, when, where, and why put an image of her in your mind? It would have been tough for Hagrid to convince Harry he was a wizard without telling him what that means, or why it’s important. As with fiction, so with copy, concisely providing these answers creates a sense of trustworthiness, and keeps readers from leaving your page to answer who, or what is talking about magical swords, and why?
2. Hobbits before Titans. Using expansive and flowery language can have the same effect as shooting a fly with a bazooka. Overuse of complex descriptive words can muddy the real information. And long, multi-part sentences are easy to write but difficult to read. This is great for long epics with multipage paragraphs explaining the details and origins of every culture appearing in the empire’s capital city. For a thirty-second ad, we want daggers, not claymores. Break long sentences into two or three shorter sentences, and cut unnecessary words.
   For your novel: Gandorf postured in the equatorial point of the crumbling bridge, recalcitrant and wholly intransigent, holding the hard-won twig of Mal’Dune in the sixth position of the Rising Tide of Vyth, and chanted the evocation that would be his dirge: Akudai, Torth k’thon, Guth k’thon, Berth k’thon.
   For your ad: Gandorf stood in the center of the crumbling bridge, defiant. His oak staff raised far overhead, he spoke his words of power — his final words: “you ain’t crossing!”
3. Search your feelings… and that of your audience. Customers choose products because it is expected to resolve some issue that is deeply rooted in their personality. This issue is what fiction writers call a character flaw. Readers relate to characters that have a flaw. They resonate with ones that share the same flaw.
   Customers do too. One example is, wanting to learn to draw in order to be acknowledged in the artistic community by peers. In other words, this skill will resolve your customer’s inner lack of confidence and their outer lack of community. As a writer, you can set a customer on an epic quest to master a skill.
   There are probably many overlapping desires behind a customer’s product choice. If you want to evoke an emotional response from your reader or customer, you need to ask them what they want most. You can even do this without asking a direct question, by opening your ad with a problem and including some of those W’s.
   Example: It’s the Rain Season; water sprites are flooding all the cellars and storerooms in the village of East fall. Farmers know all too well the pain of losing an entire harvest to sprite flooding. But, there’s hope — Rayodin Sprite Catchers is here to help.
4. Never be boring. Writer and director Billy Wilder was the man behind some of Hollywood’s most entertaining and genre-defining films — Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, and many more. Wilder had many rules for success in Hollywood, but his most important was the simplest: never be boring.
   When in doubt, remember your favorite moments in past books, TV, or film. What sticks out? Was it when the Death Star blew up? Or when the One Ring finally took a very hot bath? Speaking of hot baths, was it when a Terminator stuck its thumb up while melting down in a vat of burning slag? We all cried, right?

Fairy tales are not written to teach children that dragons exist. They know dragons exist. Fairy tales are written to teach children that dragons can be slain. And commercials are written to teach adults that Larry’s Dragon Exterminators is running a special on Dragon Traps, but call now! Supplies are limited!

Carlos Luis Delgado is an Editor at WriteLabel.com. If you’re interested in becoming part of the world’s largest writers’ room, take the test. Writers we invite to the team earn $10 for their first submission.