Four Sides at the Horse Fair

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at the horse fair in the last week of September, where a great deal of money changes hands on very little information.

Two dealers sell two equal mares,
Same age, same price, same standing there.
One says: a sound horse, twelve pound ten,
One writes four sides, and reads it then.
The short man's crowd walks off to think.
What did the long words never shrink?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two horse dealers at the September fair outside the town I've never named, and their mares, in the old chorus, were equally good. Same age, same soundness, same twelve pound ten.

The first believed in keeping it short, as most sellers do, and had a reason for it he considered obvious: nobody wants a lecture at a fair. So his card said what his card said. Bay mare, six years, sound, quiet in traffic. Twelve pound ten.

Every word true, and a buyer would stand in front of it for perhaps twenty seconds and then go away to think, because everything he actually needed to know was missing. Where had she come from. Why was she being sold. Had she ever been lame. Would she stand for a farrier. What was she like with children about. Was she good in a shaft as well as under saddle.

Those questions do not disappear when you decline to answer them. They go home with the buyer and sit in his kitchen and turn slowly into a decision not to bother.

The second dealer wrote four sides in a clear hand and pinned them to the rail beside the mare.

Where she was bred and who by. Her whole working history, farm by farm, with the years. Why she was for sale, which was that the farmer had died and the widow was selling the lot. Every one of the questions above, answered plainly, with dates. And two things against her, stated as plainly as the rest: she would not go near pigs, and she had had a splint at four which had never troubled her since and could be felt if you ran a hand down the leg, and here, look, feel it.

Nobody read all four sides. That was never the point and it is the part most people get wrong about this. Men who were idly curious read six lines and drifted off, which cost him nothing whatever, since an idle man was never going to buy a horse that morning. But the man who actually wanted a mare read every word twice, and then read the part about the splint three times, and bought her at the full twelve pound ten without a shilling's haggling.

Mark why. The two faults were doing more work than all the virtues. A dealer who tells you about the splint has told you there is nothing else, and the buyer stopped hunting for the hidden thing, which is the whole of what a man is doing when he haggles over a horse.

His rival sold his mare eventually, on the Saturday, for eleven pounds, to a man who was still not sure.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Length does not tire the interested. It only tires the people who were never going to buy, and their attention was worth nothing to you. That is the error hiding inside every instruction to keep it short: it treats all readers as one crowd with one appetite. They are two quite different crowds. The idle reader stops at the first line no matter what you do, and the person actually holding the problem will read as much as you can give them, and then ring up to ask for more.

So the true measure is not how long a thing is but whether every part of it is answering something the buyer wants to know. Length made of padding, credentials and adjectives is tiresome at any size. Length made of the questions a customer would ask if you were standing beside them is not experienced as length at all; it is experienced as being told at last.

And the buyer's questions are not a mystery. They are the same ones every time, and you have heard them a thousand times on doorsteps and telephones: what does it cost, how long, what if it goes wrong, why is it this price and not another, what do I have to do, who else have you done this for, what does it not include. Every one you leave unanswered does not vanish. It travels home with the reader and becomes a reason to do nothing, and doing nothing is the decision that beats you far more often than any rival does.

Then the part that most sellers cannot bring themselves to do, and it is the strongest thing in this letter. Name the faults. The splint, stated plainly, sold that mare, because a man who admits the one thing wrong is believed about everything else. Say what you are not good at, who you are not for, what your price does not include. You will lose the customers who would have discovered it later and been angry, which is a mercy, and you will win the doubting ones outright, since a claim that costs you something to make is worth ten that cost you nothing, as the glazier knew.

Three questions, and take a real page or quote in front of you:

1. What does your customer ask on the telephone? Write down the ten questions you answer most often. Then check how many are answered in what you send out before anybody rings. That gap is your missing pages, and it is costing you the enquiries that never happen.
2. Is your length made of answers or of adjectives? Go through what you have and mark each sentence as answering a question or admiring yourself. Cut the second sort entirely, however fine it sounds, and you will usually find you have room for twice as much of the first.
3. What is your splint? The one honest limitation you have never put in writing. Write it down, with the plain explanation beside it. Then decide whether you dare, and notice that the reluctance you feel is exactly the reluctance your customer is expecting from every seller she meets.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the long words never shrink?

The buyer's questions, which are the same size whether you answer them or not. The short card did not save the reader any effort; it merely moved the effort onto him, and he took it home and did nothing with it, as people do. Four sides pinned to a rail looked like too much to everybody in that field except the one man who wanted a mare, and he was the only man in the field who mattered.

The verse:

Say little, and they go away
To wonder what you did not say.
Tell all, tell plain, tell what is wrong,
And they'll not think it overlong.

Until next time. Go and write down the ten questions you answer on the telephone every week, and put the answers where a customer can read them before they ring.

P.S. This is not a licence to ramble, and the distinction is worth holding onto. Four sides that answer four sides' worth of questions is generous. Four sides that answer one page's worth, padded with your history and your values, is an imposition, and the reader can tell the difference within two sentences.

Also in the archive: The Fourteen-Page Proposal, The Words She Typed and There Is One of Me.