I’ll never forget the day a client asked me how long it would take to write 500 words of copy. I said it depends on the subject, but generally speaking, we’re talking somewhere in the range of 1 to 3 hours.

“Cool,” they replied. “I want you to summarise the Harry Potter books in 500 words. Three hours sounds about right.”

“Ah,” I replied. “I’ve never read any Harry Potter books.”

“Well, just skim through them and get me a 500-word summary by tomorrow. Otherwise we’ll drop you and find someone who can. Cheerio.”

The truth in fiction

Of course, none of that happened. But the inner truth is sound – the end product of a copywriting job is just the visible part of a much greater task. You can see instantly that reading the seven Harry Potter books’ 4,000 pages would be part of the job, not just the 500-word bit. Some companies get it; others don’t. But unless the time required to fully research a topic is granted in terms of deadline and fee, the end product won’t be very good.

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