The Uncredited

Several years ago, on a vacation in Door County, I walked into a little radio control shop in Ephraim with no plan beyond killing a few minutes. Every hobby shop feels the same. Tires hang on pegs along one wall. Batteries and chargers under glass. The guy at the register undoubtedly knows more about gear ratios than anyone you'll meet all week.

Then I saw them. A couple of boxes on the shelf. I’m sure it was a Blade helicopter and a Losi buggy. I knew those boxes. I knew every word on them, because I wrote every word on them.

So I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I told him.

"I wrote the copy on those," I said, pointing.

He looked at the boxes. He looked at me. Then he said something like “Huh,” and went back to what he was doing, which was something close to nothing.

That was it. No follow-up question. No story about a customer who loved that heli. He wasn't rude about it. He just didn't care, and standing there in his shop, I realized he had no reason to.

I've been a copywriter at Horizon Hobby since 2011. Most people hear "copywriter" and picture taglines. Some of it is. Most of it is a relay.

It starts with a marketing brief from a product developer. That's the raw material: specs, features, who the product is for, why it's better than the last one. From that, I write the announcement content, which we call the AC. It's the launch copy, the taglines, the feature bullets, and the what's-in-the-box list. The AC gets pulled into the product's web page. It also feeds the box art copy, which covers pretty much every panel on the box. Every inch of that cardboard is spoken for.

Then comes the sell sheet. I take the final AC and the final box copy and boil them down to one page that our salespeople send to retailers when they call. Its whole job is to get a shop owner excited about something he hasn't seen yet.

A shop owner like the guy in Door County.

For all I know, one of my sell sheets is part of why those boxes were on his shelf. If so, he cared about my writing a lot more than he let on. He just didn't know it was mine.

Which is fine. That's how it's built.

I don’t think about it often, but those products and the copy on them get shipped to hobby shops all over the world, and the copy gets translated into languages I can't read. Somewhere right now, a kid in a shop I'll never see is turning a box over and reading my sentence in a language I don't speak.

If I sat with that for very long, it would flatten me. It's too big. So mostly I don't sit with it. I write the next brief. I fix the next feature bullet that needs updating. I look up final specs. The work stays small on purpose, because small is where the sentences get good.

Most of the writing in the world works this way. Somebody wrote the directions on the back of the frozen pizza box. Somebody wrote the sign at the trailhead telling you how long the loop is. Nobody knows their names and nobody asks. Their words do the job and get out of the way.

That's what box copy is supposed to do. It has a few seconds to make somebody want the thing, and a few more to tell them the truth about it. If a reader stops to wonder who wrote it, I've done something wrong. My name would only get in the way.

I've had bylines. And I’m proud of the stuff I wrote with my name on it. But I'd bet the uncredited stuff has reached more people than everything with my name on it combined. I can't prove it. I'd still take that bet.

There's a kind of pride in that I didn't expect. It's quieter than the byline kind. It doesn't need anyone else in the room.

The owner in Door County taught me that without trying. He looked at those boxes and saw products. Good ones, I hope. He didn't see a writer, and he shouldn't have. The words were doing their job long before I opened my mouth.

Next time I walk into a hobby shop, I'm keeping quiet. I'll find the boxes I know, give them a little nod, and let them do the talking.

They're better at it than I am anyway.

Be seeing you.