Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz

This is one of the all-time great marketing books by one of the all-time great marketers. Every aspiring marketer or copywriter should read it.

Unfortunately, it’s out-of-print, and a used copy will probably cost you at least a few hundred bucks. But trust me: it’s well worth the investment. And if you implement the insights you learn, this book will pay for itself a thousand times over.

What’s so special about Breakthrough Advertising?

This goes beyond the vast majority of copywriting books that only talk about the words and how to “sell in print.” In this book, Eugene Schwartz goes deeper. He teaches you how to channel demand—in other words, how to tap into your audience’s preexisting desires.

To do that, he has to explain some little-understood but extremely important concepts like market awareness. In other words, you’ll learn how to position your marketing for audiences of different levels of sophistication.

So if you’re the first-to-market with a new product, for example, you’ll want to use simple, straightforward messaging. But if you’re entering an already saturated market, on the other hand, you’ll need to come up with something more original to stand out from the competition.

These are just a few of the high-level strategic gems hiding in this book that you can’t afford to miss. Buy it and study it.