English 4510/6510

The “Junk Mail” Project

Overview
For this assignment, you will find a book on grant or proposal writing, find the best appeals about the book, and sell it to your audience in the form of a cold call sales letter. The purposes of this assignment are three-fold:

• You will have a chance to pick and read a favorite grant or proposal writing book.
• The book you choose will also serve to supplement the textbook for the course since the textbook is not directly on grant writing.

Choosing a Book
You can pick any book that’s related to grant and proposal writing. Ideally, it should be a book published fairly recently, i.e., within the last few years. However, if you find a 10-or-20-year-old book that’s really good and helpful, that should be ok, too. Whatever book you choose, I’d encourage you to purchase the book and keep it. However, you’re free to borrow a book from a friend or the library.One important thing to keep in mind when choosing your book is that it should be a book that you genuinely believe is really good. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time convincing other people to buy the book.

Getting My Permission
Once you’ve found a good book, you need to get my permission to use the book for the book report project. The only purpose for this step is to ensure that you’ve picked a book that will be helpful to you and your classmates. Please email me the following information:

• The complete bibliographic information: author, publication date, book title, publisher location, and publisher
• A list of the chapter titles
• A brief explanation why you’ve picked the book (just a few sentences will do)

The “Junk Mail” Letter
Your Role
Your official role is the technical/professional writer for the publisher. You are writing this letter to “sell” the book. This is why it’s very important that you pick a book that you genuinely believe is really good. If you can’t convince yourself that this is a great book, you’ll have a very hard time convincing your audience about it.

Your Audience
You’re targeting a mass audience, i.e., all the people that are potential readers of this book: professional grant writers, professors teaching grant writing classes, students taking courses in grant writing, people who are thinking of starting their own non-profit organization and who need to brush up on their grant writing skills, or anybody who’s interested in grant writing. Your audience should not just be a small handful of grant writers from a dozen organizations that you personally know. In brief, it should be a large audience, but not the general public that includes everyone; instead, it’s a targeted mass audience with a common interest in grant writing.

Your Letter–Content Design
In “selling” your book, consider the following appeals:

• Function–needs it meets, problems it solves, benefits it brings
• Objective features–layout, organization, size, color
• Cost–what value for the money
• Distinguishing features–how different from competitors
• The Author(s)–any special appeals about the authors, their accomplishments, their special expertise

Your Letter–Format Design
Since this is a cold-call sales letter (or commonly known as the junk mail), the format design for your sales letter becomes very important. Consider the following aspects of format design:

• Layout–is it unique and interesting? Does it capture people’s attention? does it effectively highlight important content?
• Typography–bold face, italics, underlining, font size, typeface
• Color–good use of color can help you highlight certain information very effectively, but for mass-mailed letters, you should also consider the cost of color printing.
• Visuals–do you need to include pictures and other graphic aid?

Turning in Your “Junk Mail” Letter

Name your file “JunkMail(YourLastName)” and save it in either Word or RTF format. Email it to me (bgu@gsu.edu) as an attachment (not copied or pasted into the body of your email).