Don’t Spray Your Text With Reader Repellent

You lose your audience the second you try to sell them something

Walter Rhein

Jul 07, 2025

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Your support keeps me going, I really appreciate you!

My best ever marketing idea involved completely bypassing the decision-making process of my target demographic.

Inspiration struck during a visit to my friend Clark’s house back in 2015. He was showing off his new Alexa home assistant.

“You can just tell it to do anything?” I asked.

“Sure, try it,” Clark said.

Well, I’m a writer and selling my book is always foremost in my thoughts. It didn’t escape my attention that Clark had just granted me access to his online shopping cart.

“Alexa, I want to order 1,000 copies of Beyond Birkie Fever by Walter Rhein.”

Clark’s eyes got wide. Instantly, Alexa said, “Would you like to me to add 1,000 copies of…”

“No!” Clark cried.

“Order deleted,” Alexa said.

After I got done laughing, I said, “You know, I should make a radio advertisement with that message. Not for 1,000 copies, just 1 copy at a time. I could time the ad so it provides answers to the prompts needed to complete the sale. That way every Alexa device that is within listening distance of a radio would make regular purchases of my book.”

I’m sure that idea represents seven different types of fraud, and today Alexa has various security settings to prevent this kind of thing from happening. However, it’s fun to look back on the Wild West days of the internet when robots were vulnerable to being tricked into buying your book.

Just like modern robots, human beings also have safeguards in place to prevent them from falling for such tactics.

Writers must recognize that advertising copy represents reader repellent. An interesting quirk of the power of words is that your audience can recognize a sales pitch from the utterance of the first syllable, and it causes them to instantly abandon your text.

I can’t listen to announcements

Try as I might, I can’t listen to any form of announcement. This is leftover conditioning from grade school.

When the voice comes on the intercom and starts droning away, something in my mind kicks a release lever and I fall into a dream. I don’t care what the announcement is about or who is speaking. I’m physically incapable of listening. This is because I know that after the announcement is over I can turn to the kid next to me and ask, “So, what are we supposed to do?”

Then I’ll get a two word summary that’s much more actionable than the boring, droning announcement that’s a complete waste of my life.

I think more people have this conditioned response than they’re willing to admit. As a writer, it’s important to be aware that there are some words and phrases that have been imbued with the power to turn away the attention of your reader.

“Click here!”

“Buy now!”

“For a limited time only!”

“Please subscribe!

Reader repellent does have its uses

There are two reasons you should know about reader repellent:

You don’t want to turn away your readers when you’re about to say something important.
You might find it useful to slip in a dash of reader repellent when you wish to provide information that’s more important than you want your readers to realize.

It can be useful to disguise information dumps in a narrative. Sometimes you want your readers to be aware of things even though they don’t consciously recognize them. For example, I find it’s an effective tactic to hide important information in an announcement that’s going on in the background while two characters are trying to have a conversation.

This is kind of like magic. You can provide information in black and white on the page in a way that makes your readers look right at the words and not see them!

Disclaimers are often hidden like this. When a morning show interviews an unknown writer, they always disclose that the publisher is an affiliate of the station, but they do it in a way that makes you not notice.

Call to actions

One of the most common mistakes writers make is to fill up the last third of an article with links and information about themselves and calls to subscribe and blah, blah, blah.

Nobody reads those. People aren’t being mean, it’s just a matter of social conditioning. They aren’t capable of reading through that dump of advertising text.

Society’s constant barrage of advertising copy has rendered people physically incapable of absorbing and processing any call to action. If we responded to calls to action like advertisers wanted us to, we wouldn’t have time to do anything else. That’s why evolution has installed a filter so we don’t even see them.

That’s how conditioning works, we’re not really aware that it’s going on. This also explains how sometimes you end up driving to work when you meant to go to the grocery store. Your mind checks out and your body is put on auto-pilot.

Everybody who crawls into bed at the end of the day with a sore finger brought on from hours and hours of scrolling knows that the screen goes blurry the moment they reach the call to action section. It’s not literally going blurry, it’s just that our brains have learned to hit select/delete the instant advertising is detected. This is an involuntary response designed to preserve our sanity.

“Oops, don’t need to read this.”

When, where, and how much?

Writers can drive people away even when they come to you looking for information. Years ago, I organized and promoted a lot of sporting events. One of my tasks was creating the web pages. Actually, I used to do this with my friend Clark from the escapade with Alexa above.

Clark once gave me some very good advice. “When I’m trying to sign up for an event, nothing makes me angrier than coming across pages and pages of useless information when all I want to know is the date, where it is, and what it costs.”

Think about it for a moment. How many times have you gone to a web page in search of important information only to be assailed by a bunch of useless nonsense?

“Why aren’t they telling me the most basic piece of information that I came here to find! This should be the very first thing on the top of the page!”

So, whenever I promoted an event, I always remembered to put “who, what, when, where, why, how much” in a box in the upper left hand corner where it was easy for everyone to find. I put this box right below the “go back” button so readers’ eyes had to track over it if they wanted to leave my page.

Perhaps the most important thing for writers to remember is that people are busy! They don’t have time to read your poetic meanderings.

“Welcome to my web page! It’s a pleasure to meet you! Let me tell you a little bit about myself. Back when I was growing up, we never even conceived that one day there would be something called the internet, but today you have access to all sorts of information. Why, just yesterday I thought I’d look up a new recipe for French toast and I…”

GET TO THE POINT!

Don’t sprinkle your text with reader repellent

Be mindful of reader repellent. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing content for a client’s web page or a novel, this advice always applies.

What you need to learn how to do is attract and retain your readers, not repel them. Don’t write anything that triggers the involuntary safeguard in your perception that makes the whole screen go blank (unless you need a diversion like in an episode of The A-Team).

How do you attract readers?

Well, one way is to never make them think you want them to buy anything. Never tell them what to do. Instead, give them mysteries to work out for themselves. Like what happens when you click on the word Xenomorph in this sentence?

It’s in your mind now. Even if you don’t click, the message has been implanted. In fact, I’d prefer if you didn’t click on that word because then I’ll live rent free in your head forever (Why is just the letter “k” hyperlinked? I don’t know).

Hopefully I’ve now shown (rather than told) you how to keep your readers engaged. By the way, don’t subscribe.

Eskimo.