In early 2009, I got sick and tired of my incompetence with sales and marketing, and decided to learn. So I set out to learn, even if it meant sacrificing coding for a while.

Marketing (and its cousin, sales) has many facets, perhaps surprisingly many, with significant differences among them. Just like compiler implementation requires skills and knowledge different from 3D graphics coding, or secure web development, for example. At the "high end" of the marketing food chain, there are things like public relations. I personally don't know much about that yet.

Instead, I chose to focus on copywriting. Basically, the art and science of creating powerfully effective ads using only the written word. Often this means writing sales letters, i.e. several-page-long texts that sell something.

This focus has proven to be a good choice. It gives a very strong foundation that applies to other kinds of marketing and sales. For example, Adwords ads can be viewed as extremely short sales letters.

You asked specifically about books. Over the course of 2009, I worked through (not just read!) about half a dozen marketing tomes that people had recommended to me. In descending priority, my favorite three:

* Hypnotic Writing by Joe Vitale
* The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugerman
* Cashvertising by Drew Whitman

If you can read only three books, I'd suggest these, in the order listed. But if you can only read one, Cashvertising might actually be the best for you.

CAVEAT: Make sure you work through all the exercises the book has - and if it doesn't, invent them! Sugarman's book, for example, has few explicit reader exercises. So after each section or chapter, close the book and write an ad for your product, and/or some other product (real or imaginary), applying and exercising the principles you just learned. Use pen and paper, or better yet, a dedicated notebook. You'll miss out on at least 80% of the value of these books if you fail to do this!!

Another very good thing to do is to HAND COPY a good sales letter. Do it in long hand, on sheets of paper, with a pen or pencil. Why in the world, you ask? Because it's a powerful, powerful way to drill some of the more subtle advertising patterns into your subconscious.

Several important marketers - Dan Kennedy is one - famously recommend doing this with 100 long sales letters if you really want to manifest great skill in marketing. I've done about six of them myself, so far. Doing just the first one produced a difference in my skill that was too great to ignore.

Almost no one will do this, because it's so much work. A good solid sales letter may be ten pages, which takes me about three hours to hand copy. Let me just suggest that it's worth it, and you may want to try it out once to evaluate for yourself. Just make sure you use a GOOD (meaning, highly financially successful) sales letter - you want to make sure you ingrain good habits, not bad ones!

P.S. Cialdini and Collier are often recommended. Personally, I found less value in them. Cialdini's is good, but very, very mental and intellectual. That can be great for a typical advertising person. But most people reading this (programmers) need to be LESS mental, to grok marketing, not more. Reading even a few pages of Cialdini makes me feel "stuck in my head".

For Collier, I'm personally glad I took the time to read it, but for most people in your shoes it is probably not the first priority, and IMO not even a "must-read" at all.

EDIT: fixed formatting and a typo