Jim Allyn: Writer-Of-All-Trades

By Amy Meadows

When Jim Allyn woke up on Monday morning, he did not have a paycheck to look forward to that week. What would surprise people is the fact that he has been a professional freelance writer for thirteen years, he is a published novelist with two books and a third on the way to publication, and he supports a family that includes a wife, two daughters, and a dog. What would amaze people is the fact that his guaranteed lack of finances at the beginning of the week does not worry him at all. After thirteen years of "not starving yet," he knows the work will come.

James Vitti-The Beginning
 "When other little boys were drawing airplanes, I was drawing book jackets when I was a kid," explains James Alan Vitti. "I'm not like Grandma Moses who, at eighty, decided 'this is what I want to do.' I've always known. That's what I want to do-I want to write."

 The professional writer in Jim emerged at the youthful age of nine when he first was compensated for his work by the local Rancho Cordova newspaper, The Grapevine. The daily paper of the Sacramento suburb advertised its annual Mother's Day poetry contest, which Jim decided to enter.

"It was sponsored by some of the local merchants, so I wrote a poem about my mommy," he says jokingly, "and it won! It appeared in the paper, and I won a dozen roses for my mom. I consider that getting paid."

At fourteen, Jim wrote letters to the editor in The Grapevine, often ghostwriting for his friends who wanted to benefit from his literary talents. During high school, Jim used his talent and love of writing to act as the editor of the school newspaper and found a mentor in his advisor, Caryl Myers, who taught him the five W's. After reading All the President's Men, Jim craved a future as a journalist, seeing that someone in the profession could have an impact on society. So for part-time summer work, he wrote professionally for The Grapevine, penning sports stories and feature articles. The editors of the paper recognized the jewel they uncovered in the young writer and offered him a full-time job for the summer before he started college.

"There was a big plant in Rancho Cordova called AeroJet, which made some of the rockets that were used for the moon shot. It was the 25th anniversary of the moon shot, so I actually got to go out and interview some of the scientists and people who worked on it, which was heavy stuff for a kid," Jim recalls. "One man in particular-he had been a German scientist and astrophysicist, and he fled Nazi Germany before the war. Here I am, at eighteen, interviewing him.

After his stint as a reporter for The Grapevine, Jim began his undergraduate studies at the University of Oregon at Eugene, where his father, a high school coach and teacher, set him up in the sports information department with an internship by speaking to the head of the department before Jim even started classes. Jim covered the school's sports teams, including the football team, writing press releases and working with newspapers, television stations, and radio stations to broadcast stats and features.

"Here I was a couple of months out of high school, and I was in the press box at a major college football game. There's the TV guy and the grizzled old reporter from the newspaper. I just thought it was fun-I got to watch football games for free and eat potato salad in the press box," he recounts.

When someone mentioned to Jim that he ought to be in advertising, he took a look at the industry and decided to give it a whirl. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in advertising and set out to make his fortune.

Jim Allyn-The Direct Marketer
 After finishing college in a town where it rained all the time, Jim decided that he wanted to get back to the sunshine to start his professional career.
"I got the Yellow Pages from Honolulu and San Diego and made a list of all the ad agencies," he states. "I put together a résumé, mass mailed it out, and followed it up. I didn't have enough money to go to Hawaii, so I went down to San Diego, interviewed, and took what I thought was the best offer."

The best offer came from World Communications, Inc., an in-house mail order company founded by a self-made millionaire who would come to work in sweats and a chauffeur-driven limo. Jim worked in the company's in-house ad agency division and had the opportunity to write national television commercials right out of college. He also learned about his future niche-direct marketing.

"I didn't really know what direct marketing was," he says. "I didn't study it because this was back in 1983-the Stone Age-when there wasn't much direct marketing. I kind of fell into it and learned that direct marketing is a commodity because it is measurable."

After a year at World Communications, Inc., Jim decided to pursue other career opportunities. He and his wife, Kathy, expecting their first child, moved to the Midwest, where Kathy had grown up. For several years, Jim worked for small agencies in Dayton, Ohio, but in 1988, he lost his job. With two infants and a family to support, Jim made the decision to start freelance writing. Surrounded by the five strong markets of Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Lexington, he knew that he could land clients within an hour's drive.

"So I hung my shingle on March 10, 1988, as a freelance writer. I got the names of all the creative directors and marketing directors in those cities and sent out 500 letters. I followed up with 500 phone calls," he recalls. Within a few months, Jim had over thirty clients.

"A lot of the assignments were brochures. There was some direct mail and occasionally a print ad," says Jim, who considers himself to be a long copy man. "I've done work about submersible pumps, tandem axle suspension, and ultrasonic diagnostic scanners. A third of what I do is direct mail, a third of what I do is brochures and collateral, and a third of what I do is everything else. I have done everything from kids' menu place mats to buttons to everything short of skywriting.
It's fascinating to me because it's fun-I get a stack of papers I know nothing about and have to absorb it, learn it, summarize it, condense it, distill it, and within a week write an ad for it that makes sense."

Jim recently worked on a sizing guide for Intel, the technology company, while creating a direct mail package for Barnsley Gardens, a resort in the North Georgia Mountains established by a prince. The differences between the two pieces force him to understand the audiences for which he writes.

He explains, "In the morning, I'm sitting down and talking to an engineer and saying, 'This is why you should configure this as a 4-way instead of an 8-way because it will crash.' Then in the afternoon, I'm sitting down with this rich lady who's three generations of old money in Georgia. I think that's a great skill a writer, particularly an advertising writer, has to have-the ability to get inside the head of who he's talking to."

Jim also must know how to talk to his clients, often convincing them to do more than one project to accommodate the different audiences they want to attract. He understands that the message directed at a corporate meeting planner is different than one sent to a member of the consumer public. "If you become a good strategist instead of just a good writer," he suggests, "you invent work for yourself. That's one of the benefits I bring to the table-I'm a value-added writer."

Jim is also a fast writer. He says, "I laughingly say that my positioning is that I may not be good, but I'm fast. Ironically, the best skill that I learned in college that helps me the most in my career is cramming. Honestly, that's what I do for a living. Somebody realizes at 4:30 on Friday that he forgot something that's due on Monday, so freelancers were invented for nights and weekends."

The work style that Jim is accustomed to now allows him to control his own schedule. He works a few hours at a time in his home office, mingling his work with his family life. For instance, when his daughters return from school at 4:00 in the afternoon, Jim makes himself available to them, often completing projects at night when he is the most productive. While many people might consider his work atmosphere to be isolated, Jim spends a great deal of time on the phone with clients and often travels to their offices to work on their premises.

Over the course of Jim's thirteen-year career, during which he moved to Atlanta and grew his freelancing writing business, he has worked with 786 clients. The work he has done for them, influenced by his direct marketing heroes Bill Jayme and Sig Rosenblum, has earned him sixty awards from advertising and direct marketing clubs. It has also earned him the respect of his clients, who know him as Jim Allyn, copywriter.

Jim decided to use his middle name instead of his given name, Vitti, because "my name is an Italian ethnic name that works great in New England, but in other parts of the country, people mangle it and pronounce it wrong." However, when Jim approached his first novel, he wanted to see his real name on it.

James Alan Vitti-The Novelist
How does a man who spends hours writing to support his family manage to write a novel? The answer-he just did it.

"It's a project. At a certain point you have to hire yourself, and you have to look at it that way. I am hiring myself to do this project, and I have deadlines that I have to keep," Jim says. "John Grisham explained it really well. Anybody can write a page a day. If you sit down and write a page a day, do you know what you'll have 365 days later? You'll have a novel!"

It did not take Jim a year to write his first novel, Southern Gold, a mystery about an advertising promotion in which people hunt for buried Confederate gold. In fact, at the urging of a friend, Jim took an idea he got from an article in Indianapolis Magazine and turned it into a novel in a few short months. When he had trouble marketing the book to publishers, he took out his aggravation by writing another book, A Little Piece of Paradise. The fact that he had written two books did help him close a deal with Thomas Nelson Publishers out of Nashville, Tennessee.

"They gave me a three book deal, which is kind of unheard of for an unpublished novel-especially since the third title was not written," recounts Jim. Unfortunately, the publisher marketed the books as "G-rated thrillers," which Jim feels hurt the success of his works. Although he made between $10,000 and $15,000 on each book, more than most books make, Jim does not think that the income sufficiently equaled the amount of time he put into creating the two literary works. Hence, Jim asked the publisher for the rights back to his third novel.

Several large publishers, thanks to Jim's new agent in New York, are reading that third novel, titled Princess Island. This book will not be marketed as G-rated. Jim and his agent have "collaborated on a pitch package that's six or seven pages to sell the book-it's doesn't use the words G-rated thriller at all. This is a novel. What I found is not that people are opposed to it-they just don't care about it. They just want a good story with good characters that moves them along."

That is what Jim wants to give his readers. For him, novel writing is fun. He loves the research involved and creating a world all his own. For A Little Piece of Paradise, set in California, Jim wanted several different feels for the book.

"I wanted it to have kind of a dusty, romantic feel, and I also wanted it to be a sweet, sappy romance. So I went to the library and got a Danielle Steele book and a John Steinbeck book. I read them before I let myself sit down and start writing, and I got into that internal rhythm and flow. I like to be enveloped in an atmosphere when I work on something because, bottom-line, I'm getting into someone's head."

Although Jim feels that "it's your universe-there are no rules," he still does his homework when working on a novel. For his second novel, he ended up with seventeen pages of notes that included bios for all of his characters, detailing their backgrounds and upbringings. He crammed for three weeks before writing one word of the book, having Kathy drill him about crucial events in the lives of each character.

"Characters are the thing that probably surprise me the most about a novel," he says. "They take on a life of their own-they really do come to life. They become 3-D because you've gone through things with them in the early parts of the book. When you finish, it's like graduating from high school-it's bittersweet."

"The process I took is that I would write a chapter, and at the end of the day, I would sit down with Kathy and read it to her out loud to check the flow of it," Jim recalls. "There's one chapter near the end where there's a funeral scene, and I couldn't get through it-I was bursting into tears. I gave it to her, and she couldn't get through it. I thought, 'I think we've got it.'"

Jim's sums up his enthusiasm about his creative writing when he describes the first time he saw his book in the bookstore-"What a rush."

Jim-The Writer
Direct Marketing is his bread and butter. Novels are his passion. Writing is his life.
"You either are a writer or you aren't," Jim believes. "I don't like the phrase 'want to be a writer.' No matter what state of life you're at, even if you're not getting paid, you can write and you can get published. You can write letters to the editor. If you don't have a job writing, get a journal. Write something every day. If you look at an ad in the paper and hate it, write a better ad. Write columns for the little local paper, write letters to Aunt Mildred, write poems. Write feature articles for your own amusement. If you are a writer, really a writer, you are compelled to write."

On the same token, Jim offers this advice to other writers-write like you talk. "Most people have been trained to be formal and stuffy. So much writing is awful because it's trying to impress or to sound different. Just write like you talk," he asserts.

When readers look at Jim's direct marketing work, as well as his novels, they can see that he follows his own advice. Whether he writes a direct mail piece for Rite Aid Pharmacies, an ad for Olan Mills Kids, a 350-page mystery, or a feature article about AIM, a Gainesville-based international relief organization, Jim uses language that is fluid and elegant. He is straightforward, direct, and clever.

For instance, when "John Q. Sample" receives the direct mail piece from Rite Aid Pharmacies, he believes that Timothy Noonan, Senior Vice President, is really speaking to him. The cover letter and subsequent coupons, penned by Jim, target people with new infants, making them trust that the company is concerned about the well being of their new child and family. Rite Aid wants its audience to know that "we want to be the drug store you can count on for a thousand and one things around the house…yet we also want to let you know we care about you, your family, and your family's health." This type of writing drives consumers to the pharmacy, increasing sales for the company.

When one considers the range of Jim's work and sees his client roster, it is difficult to believe that he considers himself to be a lone wolf in regards to his writing. Although he feels that obtaining business has a lot to do with relationships, he chooses not to golf or drink or socialize heavily with other businessmen in the industry; he prefers to prospect from his own desk in his office. He enjoys the solitude of working alone on a project. "Lock me in a room and put me in front of a computer-I'm fine," he proclaims.

However, when it comes to his novels, "I've said to my agent that I have this fantasy about me and my agent and my editor having this great relationship and sitting around a table in the Bahamas together brainstorming for the next book. I read these legendary relationships between Hemingway and Max Perkins, and I think, oh man, I want that!"

What Jim really wants is to get to a point in his career where his writing-any type of writing-is his primary focus. He says, "I love to write. That's one thing that's kind of a drag about the business side of it-how much time has to be handholding and account service. I just want to write."

Unfortunately, with the Atlanta market being flooded with freelance writers, Jim has found that the market now is extremely competitive. While recruiters lure new writers to Atlanta and two-income families allow one spouse to freelance, wages have been driven down and less work is available. Jim reveals, "I have to work harder now and more hours and I make less than I did ten years ago. It's just harder to get work because there are so many freelancers in Atlanta." Lucky for Jim, eighty percent of his work now originates from out-of-town sources.

Jim also has kept in touch with old friends, classmates, and clients who refer him to new business prospects. He does not worry about business drying up; if it gets slow, he just sends out more letters. He also does not have to worry about whether or not words will come to him when projects are assigned to him.

"I don't think I've had writer's block for twenty years. You just can't. It's not an option. Part of it is personality, but the rest of it is professionalism and experience," he says.

Jim Allyn, the direct marketer, is happy writing brochures and ads. James Alan Vitti, the novelist, would love to see if he could get to a point in his career where he can write novels full-time. Right now, though, Jim is happy being both writers. For him, the writing itself-creating with words-is the most important part. It is clear that someone with Jim's passion for writing in general can be successful in any writing genre.

To Jim, writing really is a profession. He says, "I love this quote from Andy Rooney. He says that creativity is an overrated word-creativity is really a highfalutin word for what I have to get done between now and 5:00."

Posted with the permission of Amy Meadows and Jim Allyn. © 2002, 2008 Amy Meadows.