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Uncategorized, Law, housing, property, politics, society, London

Right to Buy Service Charges

bruceandholly

Thousands of people have done well out of Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy, including Labour’s Angela Rayner.  But not everyone has been so lucky.  Amongst the least-lucky are those leaseholders who purchased high-rise flats under right-to-buy and are now facing sky-high service charges.  Amongst those, are the leaseholders in Verulam House in Hammersmith Grove who are facing service charges of between £17,500 and £21,500 for window replacements which they say are not needed.  One of the problems for right-to-buy leaseholders is that although they are the ones picking up the bills, they have little say in the matter because they will always be in a minority.

Although residential leaseholders now have extensive rights to take over the management of their flats, they can only do this by acting collectively.  For example, the statutory ‘right to manage’, introduced by the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, can only apply where a majority of qualifying leaseholders are on board with it.  But this is of no help to right-to-buy leaseholders where the majority of flats in a high-rise block are still owned by the local authority and let out as social housing.  The most, to which those right-to-buy leaseholders are entitled, is the right to be consulted over proposed service charges under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.  But even this right to be consulted, is cut down for right-to-buy leaseholders because they do not have the same right to nominate their own contractor as is enjoyed by other private leaseholders.  And even the prices may be higher as councils are constrained in their choice of contractor because of the need to comply with rigid procurement regulations, which means that they cannot shop around for the best deal.

business, Law, Uncategorized

The Power of the Mailing List

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Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I discovered the power of a targeted mailing list when my book shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list for business law books on the day it was published.  A new book on cemetery and crematorium law was also an unlikely best seller.  Hardly a mass market.  But it had a couple of things going for it.

Until the book went into print in June 2021, nothing had been written on cemetery and crematorium law for almost 20 years.  The industry standard had always been Davies Law of Burial and Cremation, but that hadn’t been published since 2002 and there is still no indication as to when the next edition will come out.  In the meantime, something had to be written to fill the gap.

The second thing was that the marketing of this book had been specifically targeted to those in the cemetery and crematorium industries, who were most likely to need it.  The book itself had been commissioned by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, which represents this industry, and which meant that I had access to its mailing list.

Within minutes of the mail shots going out, the orders started coming in.  More than 100 books were sold on the first day.  Over the following months, sales of the book tapered off as the market became saturated.  But it is still making sales.

At £39.00 for the paperback, the book was not cheap.  But by law-book standards, it was not overpriced.

A 900-strong mailing list might seem miniscule compared with the 60,000 strong mailing lists boasted by some writers.  If only!  But I’m not complaining.

The book reached the people it was intended to reach.  Although I only had access to the ICCM mailing list, there will of course also be other mailing lists for a book of this type.  For example: funeral directors.

If you are thinking of putting together a mailing list, there are some things which you need to watch out for.

You can’t just throw together a list of email addresses without breaking data protection law.  And the penalties for that can be severe.  The essence of data protection is that you can only use somebody’s personal information if they have expressly given you permission to do so.  And they can withdraw that consent at any time.  One way of making sure that you don’t fall foul of data protection legislation is to use a compliant platform such Mailchimp.  It won’t cost you anything.

Nor was it a problem for me, as the recipients of the mail shot were already signed up members of the institute and receiving bulletins on a daily basis.  And judging by the volume of take-up, it was well received.

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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business, culture, job; career; money; raise; pay; increase, self improvement, society, Uncategorized, writing

Selling Your Writing in a Changing Market

bruceandholly
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Ever since the first words were written many thousands of years ago, writing for publication has been about knowing the secrets of selling.  It’s about knowing how to grab a reader’s attention in the first line.  How to interest your reader in what you are about to say.  How to keep them reading.  And to provide your reader with a call to action.  In other words, something for the reader to take away.  Being a successful freelance writer is also about studying changes in the editorial markets and adapting to those changes by changing your own business model.

30 years ago there were always opportunities for someone who knew their subject and could write to a publishable standard, to earn a good second income writing for professional and trade journals.  There was also the excitement of receiving money through your letter-box.  But no-one writes cheques any more.  And editors no longer have to pay freelancers to fill their pages, because they receive so much quality material free of charge from businesses wishing to promote their goods and services.  But even promotional material has to be professionally written.  And someone has to be paid to write it.  Why not you?

Forget expensive newspaper and TV advertising.  The most cost effective way to promote the sale of goods and services is on the Internet.  It’s about drawing the casual Internet browser to your website and to the goods and services you are offering.  Today, the ‘keyword’ is king.  It is about trying to anticipate the words and phrases which your prospective customer is going to type into their search engine, when they are looking for the type of goods and services which you are offering.  It is those critical keywords which must be incorporated within your promotional material to draw those prospective customers to your website.

So what about artificial intelligence (AI)?  Is that going to make freelance writers redundant?  If your computer can write your promotional material, why do you need to pay a copywriter? 

They said the same thing about secretaries when word processing was invented at the end of the 1970s.  But it didn’t happen.  Instead, the amount of paperwork ballooned.  The issue with any piece of written work generated entirely by a computer is that it lacks originality.  I learned that when I asked my computer to generate some promotional material for a book I had written.  Instead, it repeated back to me the promotional material which I had already written.  I’m sure that if I asked my computer to compose my next Eurovision hit, it would come back to me with a mishmash of every successful Eurovision entry which had ever been written, including words and music from ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’.  Is that going to convince anyone?  I don’t think so.  ‘United Kingdom – Nil points.’

Just to show you how modern marketing works, I have included at the end of this article, a link to my book, ‘Write Quick.  Get published.’ I’m not asking you to buy it.  Just to notice it.  And if you do notice it, please take a moment to look inside.  If you then decide to buy a copy, I’ll be raising a glass.  Cheers!

business, job; career; money; raise; pay; increase, Law

Told you have failed an examination which you have passed

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Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

According to the Law Society Gazette, 174 students were wrongly told that they had failed the Solicitors Qualifying Examination, when they had in fact been successful in those exams.

It happened to me half a century ago with the old Law Society Finals.  In those days, the results were published in The Times newspaper and later confirmed by letter.  If your name was not amongst the published list, it meant that you had failed. So, at 6.30 that August morning I rushed out and bought my copy of The Times.

Yippee!  My name was on the list.  But my jubilation turned to disappointment later that morning when I received through the post a letter from the College of Law commiserating me on my failure.  What was that all about?

It turned out that it was all a mistake.  The examiner had mixed up my name with someone else when posting out those important letters.  So I had passed after all.  Phew!

culture

Government Smoking Ban? Criminals Must Be Laughing

bruceandholly
Photo by Taryn Elliott on Pexels.com

Haven’t we learned anything from 1920s prohibition?  That if you ban something, you immediately create a black market.  Imagine how happy the world would be if there was no drug crime.  And have you noticed that the medical advisers supporting banning the sale of tobacco to young people are the same scientists who destroyed their educations through successive covid lockdowns, which also destroyed livelihoods and brought the UK economy to bankruptcy.  We are still paying for it.

I speak as someone who gave up smoking back in the 1970s, when smoking was still the cool thing to do.  I gave it up because I am asthmatic. And because I was never a heavy smoker, giving up was not too difficult for me to do.  For me, was just about breaking a habit.  But is not for me to tell you what to do with your own bodies.  Since then, there have been occasions when I have tried the occasional cigarette or cigar.  Just to get in the party spirit.  But I’ve never enjoyed it.  The last time I smoked was 10 years ago on a baking hot summer’s day, when I shared a shisha pipe in someone’s back garden, whilst children were having a birthday party inside the house.  It took me another two days to get my lungs back.

Going to the pub has never been the same since the government banned smoking back in the 1990s.  The ambience has gone.  They also say that people who don’t smoke, don’t drink.  So no wonder so many pubs have gone to the wall.  But isn’t there another reason why the government have chosen this election year to get us talking about smoking bans for young people? 

Wouldn’t the government rather have us talking about smoking bans than its own economic failures?  The fact that there is a housing crisis?  That for the first time in 100 years, people are having to use food banks?  That we can’t even walk down the high street without tripping over a sleeping bag?