A couple months ago, I stopped selling my flagship course, Copy Riddles.
Copy Riddles was based on a Gary Halbert’s advice for how to learn to write bullets — look at the bullets written by the best copywriters, look at the book or course those bullets were selling, and see how the copywriter did his alchemy to transmute lead into gold.
I had various reasons for retiring Copy Riddles. I wrote about one of them in an earlier email. But even if I had no good reasons initially, the fact that I’ve publicly announced that I’m retiring the course means I won’t bring it back.
Frank Sinatra retired in 1971. “I have sung my last song for the public,” he said with a sigh. Fans were shocked. But then, 2 years later, Frank came back with a TV special, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, and he started touring again.
Ol’ Blue Eyes could get away with that, but you won’t see Ol’ Bejako doing it, in spite of several people writing to tell me that not selling Copy Riddles is a crime. I’ve simply found it easier to keep my word as a general life policy.
At the same time, I’m genuinely proud of Copy Riddles as a course, and there are people who say there is significant tonnage to what they’ve learned about copywriting from it.
So a few days ago, while I should have been washing myself but was instead just standing in the shower and thinking, I had an idea.
Could I sell the rights to Copy Riddles to somebody else?
Like I said, I don’t want to be the one selling it to the public any more.
But there’s clearly demand for the course, even with my absolute lack of promotion of the thing. Maybe somebody else would like to own the rights to Copy Riddles and sell it himself or herself.
With the tiniest bit of work, you could get affiliates lined up — for example, I’ve had Derek Johanson of CopyHour promote Copy Riddles in the past. I’ve had Bob Bly agree to promote it right before I decided to retire it. And Daniel Throssell asked to promote it right after I retired it.
If you’ve already got a list of people interested in copywriting, you could sell Copy Riddles to your list directly — the thing regularly brought in 5-figure paydays for me when I re-launched it every few months, and that’s with my small list that had seen the offer a lot.
Plus, maybe you could even run cold traffic straight to the sales page. I can’t say with any certainty it would be a winner, but I did talk to A-list copywriter Lorrie Morgan recently, and she was telling me what a good sales letter I’d written for Copy Riddles. Plus, I wrote it in an impersonal way, to be convincing to somebody who doesn’t know anything about me personally and who hasn’t read any of my emails.
All these are just ideas.
I don’t know if anybody is interested in taking Copy Riddles off my hands, or really how this would work. But I am intrigued by the potential.
If you are intrigued as well, and if you are serious about the idea of buying the rights for Copy Riddles from me, write me to say so, and we can start a conversation around it.