Philippa Dowding, Copywriter

Philippa Dowding is an award-winning children's author and copywriter. She has twenty-five+ years of web and print marketing experience in corporate, agency and freelance settings, and has won numerous industry awards for her clients, including Maclean's, Chatelaine, Today's Parent, Canada's History, and Zoomer magazines.

Her client list includes publishers, NGOs, fundraisers, business-to-business and corporate clients, movie producers, agencies, pharmaceutical clients and more. 

Recent Clients Include:

Magazine clients: Canada's History, Canadian Art, Briarpatch, Inuit Art Quarterly, SKYNEWS, Quill and Quire, Kayak: Canada’s History Magazine for Kids, EcoParent, ​and more.

Magazines Canada Interview  with Inuit Art Quarterly about Creative Success with Philippa Dowding 

More recent clients: 

Experiences Canada, 2022
(Federal Student Exchange Program,
​Corporate Giving Brochure)
 
Canadian Tree Tours, 2018
(Self-guided tree tours) 

WORK HISTORY:

2000 – Present, Freelance Marketing Copywriter
Work with various publishing, business-to-business, educational and fundraising clients, to provide web and print consultation/copy for acquisition and retention campaigns, renewals, bills, brochures, newsletters, 3rd-party cross-promotion, inserts, radio, telemarketing & television scripts, press releases, one-sheets, and more.

1990 - 2000, Creative Manager, Rogers Publishing
Managed in-house circulation creative team for Canadian magazines, including Maclean's, Chatelaine, Canadian Business, Profit, MoneySense, Today's Parent, LouLou, Flare, Marketing, HELLO!, and many more.

Industry Awards: Copywriting

ACE (Award for Circulation Excellence) 2013
Zoomer Magazine, new "cold file gift campaign" - #10 package drove gift subscriptions from current subscribers

ACE 2012
Zoomer Magazine, 3rd party upsell series with H&R Block


ACE 2008
Canada's History Magazine, new 3-part Christmas gift renewal series

ACE 2002
Chatelaine in-book “Treat Yourself” ad. Beat response to previous in-book ad by 2 to 1.

ACE 2001
Maclean’s shorter renewal series to loyal subscribers; reduced number of renewals sent, increased retention.

ACE 2000 & RSVP Certificate of Merit 2000
Maclean’s “professional package”, larger order form and push on three year term. Tripled cash with order, lengthened average term.

ACE 1997
Maclean’s “magalog” Free Standing Newspaper Insert (FSI), 12-
page full colour magazine format. Creative Platform: “Canadians are nice, quiet, rather dull people. (Yeah, right).” Control FSI for 3 years.

RSVP, Certificate of Merit, 1995
Today’s Parent control acquisition package, with “It’s 3 a.m. Your child has a fever of 102.1...” Was the grand control package for 12 years.

RSVP, Silver, 1993
Maclean’s Christmas “reindeer” ad series

Birth of a children's author, part 2

This is part 2 in a 2-part post:

How a copywriter becomes a children's author, was published last week.

People often ask me: how do you become a children’s author?

Everyone’s journey is different, of course (my usual answer). But I’m pretty sure the journey is seldom straightforward, or what people expect.

For one thing, a writer’s life is lonely, there’s no other word for it. You have to be able to sit for hours and hours, with only your imagination and your computer for company. You have to be able to lose yourself in your head, so a penchant for daydreaming is important. I sometimes wonder what I must look like, sitting at my desk (or on my couch, or at my dining room table), staring at a laptop.

Distant, self-absorbed and pretty dull, no doubt.

Reading a lot is important, too. And maybe a degree in something like English, or communications, or even writing (not an option when I was in university), but even those things probably aren’t essential.

More important than any of that, I’d say the most crucial element in becoming a children’s author is an absolute belief that stories matter.  You have to care.

Can you teach that? Can you learn it? I’m not sure.

I guess you either feel it, or you don’t.

When my children arrived in the mid- and late-nineties, I was still a full-time gainfully employed copywriter. Then in 2000, I went freelance (there was a buyout offer, with a monthly retainer from my ex-employer, and with two little kids at home, it seemed perfect).

For the next five years, I did continue to write copy, lots of it (I still do write copy, for clients when they ask, I love it and always will). Like every other parent who decides to go freelance and work from home, I knew the family bank account would take a hit. It did. I knew I’d miss the daily connection with other adults. I did, at least a little. I also expected it to get harder and harder to find new copywriting clients once I was working full time at home. It was.

All pretty forseeable. But what I didn’t expect, what I couldn’t have known, was how much I was going to absolutely LOVE reading to my kids. Or how much fantastic children’s literature had been written in the two decades that had passed since I’d stopped reading kids’ books. 

Like most writers I imagine, I read everything I could as a child. The Narnia series (dozens of times), the Hobbit, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, John Christopher and John Wyndham, then later, Lord of the Rings, I read it all again and again.

But there was no Robert Munsch, no McHale, Rowling or Riordan. It was all to come.

Wow. Reading children’s books to my kids was like discovering a new planet. We were lucky enough to inherit an older cousin’s huge children’s library, and we had hundreds of the finest books (my sister-in-law spared no expense) from the ''80s and '90s, filling the shelves. Picture books (Corduroy Bear, what a delight!), early readers (25 Magic Treehouses, all of the Berenstein Bears, Franklin the turtle, dozens of Goosebumps), then middle grade books (Tuck Everlasting, the Bobby Pendragon books, Jacob two-two and so on and so on).

Then like some special gift, along came Harry Potter. I have a confession: I read each Harry Potter book in the entire franchise before my children did. When the last book came out, my children (who were tweens by then) couldn’t find me. I locked myself in my bedroom, and spent a twenty-hour read-a-thon, finishing the series. I didn’t feed anyone, or cook anything, or answer the door or the phone, or make eye contact with the outside world.

I just read.

Thanks to Emma Dolan for the drawing of Gargoth

It mattered to me, deeply, what happened to Harry, Hermione and Ron. I really, really cared. Just like my willingness to read Franklin’s Blanket ten thousand times, or Dinosaur in the Park (a weird little picture book that my son and I adored, about a dinosaur-shaped garbage can that comes to life), or any of the other books we read together for years, I deeply, passionately loved them all. I believed in the story.

Then it happened. My future came calling.

On Christmas Eve of 2004, my children, husband and I were walking through a snowy downtown Toronto, on Queen Street’s east end. We ducked into a small antique shop. My family wandered around, and I was drawn, like something was calling me, to the back of the store. A funny glow was coming from a stairway, beckoning me.

I was drawn to the staircase, and there … on each step, lit by a candle … were dozens of gargoyles.

Yes, gargoyles! I watched the little statues in the flickering candlelight, and was struck by how … alive they looked. One of my children called me, and I looked away. When I looked back at the staircase, I gasped: I was sure that the gargoyles had all switched places while my back was turned!

That night, I put my children to bed with sugarplums and gargoyles. I started a bedtime story about a little gargoyle in our backyard. He was lost, scared, sad, and naughty. He got the little girl who lived in the house in trouble, but the adults couldn’t see him. After a few nights, my children were asking for more stories about the gargoyle. Where did he come from? Why was he there? Why was he sad?

He had a huge backstory, and what amazed me was that it was all there, waiting to be told.

After a week of gargoyle bedtime stories, my daughter said one night, “You know, that’s good, Mum. You should write that down.”

And it was like someone had hit me. I just hadn’t thought of writing a children's book before, but she was absolutely right. This little character came to me, fully formed, into my head. And into my heart. He had a story to tell, and there he was, just waiting for me to tell it.

I cared, I really, deeply cared, about him. So I told his story. It took me a year of Saturday afternoons, trying to figure out if I could actually tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. When I finished my first draft (64 pages), I got my daughter (ten at the time) to read it. She spent a few hours in her room with my manuscript, and I kept trying not to hover outside her door. I was really resigned: if it’s no good, at least I tried, I thought.

Finally she emerged from her room, and said flatly, “How did YOU write this?”

And that’s how I became a children’s author.

See part 1 from last week, how a copywriter becomes a children’s author.

How a copywriter becomes a children's author, part 1

This is part 1 in a 2-part post: The birth of a children's author will follow next week.

There's no stranger life, I'm sure, than being a writer.

You've probably heard that before, nothing new there. Long periods of silence

Icarus, Alexander Deineke

and stillness, where one lives entirely in one's head, are followed by intense bouts of socializing and reading in public. It's a curious mixture of talents. But people ask me a lot: how does one BECOME a children's author? I'm sure everyone's journey is different, is my usual answer, although some paths are no doubt stranger than others. 

As I move further into the world of being a children's author, and slowly watch my copywriting life recede quietly on the leafy path behind me, I realize how beautifully these two professions dovetail into each other. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about why that is...

I've been incredibly lucky in my writing life. I'll tell you how I got here, but believe me, much of a writer's life is luck. Yes, there's the luck of a good early education. There's the need to read everything, to absorb language and media, to instinctively understand and feel different writing styles, to keep trying ... but nothing can replace the luck of a fantastic early employer.

My first job after graduate school, was as a production assistant in the circulation department at Key Porter Publishing in Toronto. They published Your Money and Canadian Business magazine, but the building also held the staff for Quill & Quire, Toronto Life, Where magazines and others. 

I was surrounded by smart young journalists and editors, and made contacts there that still resonate, 25 years later. My cousin was an editor at Q&Q, and gave me my first taste of review writing (I wasn't very good at it). Key Porter's offices were above the Organ Grinder restaurant on Front Street. Likely no one remembers the Organ Grinder, but they did indeed have an organ, which they ground with abandon after six o'clock. If you were working late, you knew when it was time to go: the organ vibrating in the floor beneath your feet chased you from the building. It made for a hilarious carnival workplace atmosphere! 

That job, which only lasted six months, was my crash course in marketing and promotion. I went to press approvals, lettershops, data houses, and I sat in on marketing meetings. I was fascinated, watching words turn into art, then into film (this was the pre-digital early-'90s world), then into print, then into a mailed piece.

After Key Porter, I was hired as Production Supervisor in the circulation department at the Financial Post, which was turning from broadsheet newspaper to daily tabloid that year. I already had an MA in English, but that job was my Masters in Business. This was in the Toronto Sun building on Front St. in Toronto, the huge web presses were in the building then, and at six o’clock, they fired up for the evening print run. Paper fell off desks, the windows rattled, chairs vibrated beneath you. If working above the Organ Grinder added a carnival atmosphere, working at the Sun after-hours was like sitting on top of a restless, grumbling dragon.

For three years, I learned how to balance a print budget, work with designers, printers, newspaper journalists, editors, cartoonists, illustrators, circulation directors, publishers and ... copywriters. I was instantly drawn to these chameleons of the written word.

.

I had lunch with them, hung out with them after hours, and I begged my boss to let me write last minute copy for our department because I was fascinated by what they did. I was so thrilled when I was given a chance to write copy, and spent hours listening to the presses roar beneath me, while labouring over brochure headlines, bullets, and body copy for our department. Nothing was too small or insignificant for me, every job was important. Soon, I was freelancing as a copywriter, but I kept my day job in production.

Then, one day I got a phone call. A freelance client needed a full time copywriter, fast. And that was it, hard work paid off. And I was lucky: a job turned up. I went to work full time at Maclean Hunter publishing, as their senior copywriter in the circulation department.

And this was my PhD in writing, working among a full department of magazine designers, writers and marketers. We went on retreats – retreats! – to learn how to write and produce great work. We were sent to seminars and experts came to us: for a full year we had a monthly visit from a New York/Madison Avenue advertising consultant, flown in to Toronto to teach us how to be better writers and communicators. I’m not kidding. As a writer, those days were fantastic. We’d get an assignment, we’d write it, he’d review it and tell us how to make it better, all in one day. I remember a full day learning how to write better subscription blow-in cards (the ones that fall out at your feet when you open the magazine, yes, I was very good at those). Sadly, I’m sure we were the last generation of marketing writers who got such fantastic training.

For ten years I wrote everything, and I mean everything, for circulation marketing for Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Profit, Marketing magazine, Today’s Parent, then later HELLO! Copy for envelopes (get that envelope opened!), letters, renewals, invoices, newspaper inserts, in-book ads, in-book cards, transit ads, radio ads, speeches, letters from the publisher, 12-page magalog inserts in a national campaign for Maclean’s magazine, corporate letters to national sales divisions, and on and on.

I was so lucky, so very lucky, to be a full-time, professional copywriter. Long before I began to write for children (my first book came out in 2009), I had years of learning exactly how to speak to people on a grand scale, and how to elicit a response. I learned how to treat every single reader like an individual, and how to express, exactly and succinctly and in an entertaining way, what they were supposed to do next. Pick up the phone and order now. Turn the page. Keep reading. Order a magazine subscription. Renew. Pay your invoice. Order a gift. Do it now. Here’s how. It’s easy. Here’s why you should, once again.

What a perfect crucible for a children’s author: every word counts, every word is valuable, and here’s how to keep vast numbers of very different people turning the page and nodding their heads. Here’s how to get them to DO something, to read, to enjoy, to agree to spend time with you after you’ve extended your writer’s hand, from the very first word.

More than all that though, my copywriting life taught me how to be brave and experimental, and how to know and trust my voice, to take risks and wave my creative flag, how to be a chameleon at the carnival, writing on top of a dragon. 

Then, in the mid- and late 1990s, my children arrived, and now I had someone to read children's books to. I had an audience of two, who wanted to hear bedtime stories about their day, as told by their mother ...

Part 2 next week: The birth of a children’s author

ACE award for Zoomer and me!

Really delighted to find out today that the Zoomer magazine marketing team and I won an ACE award (Award for Circulation Excellence) from the CMC.
Thanks so much!
The ACE is an annual industry award, given to the creative team that gave the biggest boost to a magazine campaign and perhaps even exceeded circulation expectations. In this case, we won for a "Cold Donor Gift Campaign" - meaning we asked current Zoomer subscribers to give a gift subscription ... and they did!
It's so great to be a copywriter AND a fiction writer. Love both worlds.
Here's a link to all the winners: Masthead Online

10 author tips for a happy bookstore event

My third YA book has just been published, The Gargoyle at the Gates, and I am starting a new promotional phase. Every children's author will tell you that they do classroom and library visits all year long, but when a new book comes out, they have to also add another element: the bookstore event.
Hard core, full on, cold sales on the floor of a busy bookstore can make some authors want to quit writing right then and there. And yes, it can be grueling, to spend two hours standing in a bookstore, beside your table, hoping people will make eye contact and talk to you.
Lots of people won't. You'll be disheartened by having crowds of children and their parents walk, no run, past you to the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid display, or mistake you for an employee and ask you where the bathroom is (this one happens a lot). You'll also find people who want to talk to you for fifteen minutes, and you still don't make a sale. Still, there ARE ways to make the bookstore sales event more pleasant and successful. And face-to-face selling is really, really valuable for any writer, especially if you are starting out. You get to talk to your audience and tell them what's so great about your book. You'll see how potential readers react to your title. Some kids will even sit down and start reading (I love that). And no matter what, there will always be someone in the store -- it's a bookstore, after all, people are there to buy books -- who is really excited to meet an author, even if they've never heard of you before. Full disclosure here: I've been a marketing writer and events planner for over twenty years. I've shilled for magazines, books, publishers and now my own books at various events, big and small, for decades. It IS hard, but here are a few tips I've found that really help:

1. Have an inviting table. Don't expect the bookstore to do it for you. Buy some book holders, take a table cloth, and make sure people can pick up your book easily. Put the display in the middle and the books at the edges for easy browsing.
2. Take flyers. It seems like an extra expense since you'll be standing right there, but some people are reserved, they'd like to read about you then decide if they want to talk to you. I take colour posters of my books with brief descriptions and stick them to the table, and leave a few for people to read or take away. This is also great if the table gets busy, and you can't answer everyone right away.
3. Get a prop. I have two: a gargoyle puppet and a 4-foot gargoyle poster. The puppet is a strangely outgoing salesman, and the giant 4-foot poster draws people to the table. (It is also at least as big as any other poster in the store, as big as say The Diary of a Wimpy Kid poster, for instance).
4. Hand out bookmarks, have a fun freebie. Bookmarks are a great way to introduce yourself, and inexpensive walk-away marketing whether someone buys your book or not. I also have a gargoyle stamp for inside books and kids' hands, another great freebie.
5. Don't just sit there. Ask the store to place you somewhere with lots of foot traffic, and don't sit down (unless you need a break and no one is around). Stand near your table, and talk to people. I wear my gargoyle puppet and get him to hand out bookmarks. If your section is quiet, walk into other parts of the store and hand out bookmarks and introduce yourself. Engage people, politely.
6. Know what  you're going to say. "Hi, I'm a local author selling my latest adventure book here today, perfect for 9-12 year olds," or something else fast and inviting. Tell them who you are, what you're selling and why, fast. If you're sincere, and you will be since it's your book, it's possible not to come across as a car salesman.

7. Don't assume about people. You never know who is going to buy your book. Humans never cease to amaze me. The harried mum with five kids, the quiet grandmother, the businessman, the young jock, engage them all. The person who seems completely unlikely, the 19-year-old skater dude in dreads for instance, might love what you are selling and buy five books for his little cousins. It's happened!
8. Third party endorsements really help. If you've won an award or been shortlisted or commended anywhere, invest in some stickers and slap them on your titles. People care what other people think.
9. Take "no" for an answer. You aren't a telemarketer. No means no, especially face-to-face. Don't take it personally, either. Just politely move along.
10. Thank the bookstore owner, and keep in touch. You are developing a professional relationship with someone, and you'll presumably be writing and promoting another book, one day. They want to promote you, it's good for them to have authors in their store. Plus, once they know your titles, they will likely be sure to keep them in stock and promote them. Win Win!

So, bookstore events do get easier the more you do them. And often, it's even fun.
PD

8 reasons why I love being a writer ...

Plenty of writers work all summer. I’m not one of them. 

Married to a teacher, with two teens and a young dog, my house is never quiet in the summer. 

See #5

We are riotous, busy, loud, which is great, but it's no place for lengthy, distraction-free writing time. Oh, I do write, but output is nothing like during the winter months.
So every year at about this time, I start to miss all the projects I've put aside for a few weeks. I start itching to roll up my sleeves and get at it. Perhaps this hiatus is just what refuels me, every fall.
I’ve also had enough time away to stand back and really look at what it is I do.  I’ve had a great career as a copywriter, a poet, and now a children’s author.
So here, in no particular order, are 8 reasons why I love being a writer:

1. Words are clean and tidy. Until they get messy, but it’s never a mess that requires a garbage bag and a pair of work boots to fix. Unless something has gone terribly wrong, of course!
2.  The story is always waiting. No matter how you leave it, your story is always waiting for you, patiently, to get back to it. You're rewarded in a way that you aren't by say, doing the laundry or feeding the dog.
3. People value books.  Years ago on the way to work one morning, I saw a guy reading Macleans magazine on the subway. A piece of paper fluttered out of the magazine: a subscription flyer I’d worked on for weeks! I was a little chuffed … until the guy got up and stepped on it (tough lesson, best learned early if you’re a copywriter). Copy is valuable and has a job to do, sure, but a book? I’ve never seen anyone step on a book.
4. Getting lost. Writers will get this: you really can lose yourself in the story. I’ve looked up from my screen to find that it’s 4:00 in the afternoon, and I’ve been writing for 6 hours straight. Perhaps everyone can be so engrossed when they like their job, but I’ve never found anything that takes me so far from my couch without having to move anything but my fingers, with the possible exception of reading a great book.
5. A book, what a marvel. Lots of people toil at things they love, of course. People are no doubt proud of a wonderful spreadsheet or a well-painted house, but for me, seeing all my work finally compose itself into a printed, bound book is something that still delights me. It always will.
6. Acclaim? For me? I have to admit, being nominated for awards is a rush. Let me state that there are lots of great books out there by very talented writers who have never been nominated for anything, and it doesn’t stop them from continuing to write great books which people enjoy. And really, if I’m never nominated for anything ever again, that’s fine. But getting nominated, receiving just a tiny bit of acclaim … always a lovely surprise.
7. The people are interesting, too. Editors, promotion people, sales people, booksellers, librarians, other writers, everyone stays in this industry because they love books and storytelling. Is there another industry in which so many smart people do so much, for let's face it, so little?
8. Nothing like pyjamas. Oh, if you’re a writer you know. If you’re not a writer or someone who works from home, you’ve likely heard this and winced. But it’s true: there’s nothing like working in your pyjamas. And going to mid-day yoga class. And walking the dog whenever you feel like it. Or making tea when you need it. Yes, writing is risky, so that’s the price we pay. Not knowing if the work will be good, enjoyed, published or read by anyone at all. Not knowing if we’ll make money at something we’ve worked at, hard, for months, years. But, putting all that aside, I’ll say it again: working in your pyjamas rocks.

Those are 8 top reasons. What are yours??

PD