Book Creation, Book Design, Web Copy, Consultation
Client: Worldleaders Inc.

Late in 2015 I was hired by Worldleaders Inc. to provide a wide range of services including the creation and production of a book, business documents, Powerpoints, multiple web sites, graphic illustrations, internet marketing involving AdWords, Amazon and Youtube — quite a wide range of work.

The principal figure I had the honor of working with was Worldleaders CEO Joe Morone – in the opinion of many (myself included) the world’s leading B2B sales trainer.

One of the problems of being a ghostwriter is that nondisclosure agreements prevent you from pointing to any particular book and admitting that you had any part of it. Joe Morone, to his credit, more than once pointed out my contribution to his book, graciously and publicly. The bulk of the credit for any book lies with the client, of course, but I’m especially grateful to be able to point to this one, because I consider it one of the best books on sales ever done.

For anyone with the least interest in sales, I recommend Joe’s classes, trainings and services 100%. By all means, read The Smart Sales Method, now available at Amazon.com. It is damn good.

Business Writing, Document Design
Client: Syd Chase Group

This is a piece that I did for an upstate New York real estate investor who wanted to interest foreign investors in American properties.

It was an enjoyable project for me because it gave me the chance to do the entire project in one integrated whole, from writing the content to designing the document to carrying it through to publication. It’s a good example of straight and direct business prose.

Though it was mainly intended for print — and smooth glossy cover stock, crystal-clear image resolutions, and fine paper quality certainly makes a difference — it’s worth reviewing as a PDF: you can download the document in full here.

Magazine Articles
Client: Metropolitan

I’ve written magazine articles too. Usually ghostwritten articles, for clients, but every once in a while I write one under my own name, just to show passersby like yourself that, by golly, I really am a published professional writer.

Here are four articles I wrote for Metropolitan Magazine. In one I had the pleasure of interviewing the distinguished British orchestra conductor, Christopher Seaman; in one I describe the anatomical science exhibit, Our Body: The Universe Within; in one I review an international art exhibit featuring artists from New York and Toronto; and one piece is a profile of Writers & Books, America’s third largest literary center, where I taught various writing classes for several years.

To read the full articles, just click the linked text and download.

Book Creation, Book Design, Editing

Client: Center for Virtual Worlds and Education Research

Some years ago a number of academicians and others interested in virtual worlds and education decided to put together a formal peer-reviewed journal. I became Managing Editor throughout the creation of the first issue, and one of my duties was the creation of a full publicly-available print and digital version of that first issue. Here it is, and you can download the full 213-page digital version here.

It isn’t the first academic publication I worked for, and the criteria were strict and subdued rather, but it’s the only full book I’ve done that I can provide for your inspection free of charge. And (if you’re interested in the subject, or academic writing) there’s some interesting material among the contributions. Enjoy.

Interviewing, Copywriting
Client: University of Rochester Medical Center

One day I got a call from the University of Rochester Medical Center. Could I interview some students and write their profiles for the School of Nursing?  Sure.

For once my contribution wasn’t design but pure copywriting. I talked to the students, got their stories and wrote draft pieces in as close to their voices as I could manage. Then I gave them the drafts, got their inputs, edited the pieces accordingly, and sent the results up to the University, which hosted them online for several years.

In some ways it was my first extended introduction to ghostwriting, a craft where interviewing is key, as is catching the collaborating author’s voice. After working with eighteen subjects on eighteen pieces, working with a single subject on a book was a piece of cake.

Print Advertisement Copywriting, Document Design
Client: Writers & Books

“You don’t have to be articulate to change the course of history. You don’t have to express yourself clearly to be a leader or make a difference. But it helps.”

Indeed.

I’m a little foggy on how many years I taught writing on subjects across the board at Writers & Books, the third largest independent such writing organization in America. Seven years? Eight? At some point they asked me to do a print ad for them, and there it is. The gentleman in the picture is a fellow writer of some merit. I thought he could do with a spot of PR.

Print Advertisement Copywriting, Document Design
Client: Dr. Mark Groskin

Mark Groskin, a fine Rochester dentist (and one I patronize) asked me one day if I could create a half-page black and white ad for him for the Messenger Post Newspaper Group. Of course, said I.

I designed the ads below, and they ran (successfully) in several newspapers. He liked it the top one enough to go full page! Check ’em out:

Print Advertisement Copywriting, Document Design
Client: Dr. Mark Groskin

Speaking of full-page newspaper ads, here’s one of my first, done eons ago for the Fitness Studio of Pittsford. An idea ahead of its time: the Studio aimed at bodybuilding for high-ticket clientele, and my requirement for this ad was to be elegant. I like requirements like that.

I did quite a few little things for the Fitness Studio of Pittsford — click here to see various items I created in the course of doing an entire campaign.

Print Magazine Advertisement, Ad Copy
Client: Long Life Magazine

This plain classic Old School magazine ad was for Long Life magazine. Loved doing the text — it had a ominous, faintly sci-fi quality.

Web Design, Web Copy, Book Design, Publishing
Client: Frank J. Edwards, M.D.

This was a web site I did for poet, physician, novelist — and now friend — Frank J. Edwards

This site has a story behind it. Originally I was hired by an Arizona publisher to do a new book cover for Dr. Edwards’ well-reviewed novel Final Mercy (now available on Amazon, and rightly described in an Amazon review as “one of the best books published in 2011…”)

The book turned out to be a medical thriller, and Frank J. Edwards was a story in himself: former Vietnam helicopter pilot, Master of Fine Arts in Writing, published poet, academic author, Emergency Physician.

We hit it off at once. So much so that when the time came for me to launch a small publishing venture of my own, Pascal Editions, Frank (who had re-acquired the rights to his novel) allowed Pascal Editions to publish it as its first fiction title.  

Every author nowadays needs a web presence, and eventually I had the pleasure of helping build one for Frank at his then web site and through further design work, including a Frank J. Edwards screensaver. (Click, download and enjoy.)

I’m also happy to say that the relationship has continued. His second novel, Reap, is also a Pascal Edition, as is his most recent volume of poetry, The Problem With Zero.

Web Design, Author Promotion
Client: Colin Trafford

A more recent project for a very different author. Colin Trafford has not sent me all the content needed for the pages, nor even finished publication arrangements for his books, but his amazing reviews are online, and they are certainly worth a browse.

In any case, he gave me carte blanche to create a site with a touch of elegance, and told me to make it public as is.

I’d like to get the site (and the talented Colin) some attention asap, so here it is. Stop by!

Web Design and Web Copy, Graphic Design
Client: Browncroft Garage

The best garage in Rochester, and the one I used for many, many years. Winner of City’s Best of Rochester Award. Over the years I did the web site and contributed some design work. Here was a business card design:

Web Design, Web Copy, Ad Copy
Client: Steve Greene

Steve Greene! Guitarist extraordinaire, bluesman, jazz artist, recording artist, composer, teacher, master of a vast multitude of string instruments. Steve had an existing web site, but wanted another one that focused on his teaching activities. So he called me up.

I suggested to Steve that he might want to do a bit of internet advertising; and to that end, I ended up knocking out a quick variety of digital ad images I thought he’d like — see below. He didn’t care for a single one!

Web Design, Political Blog
Client: Peter Thomas Simon

A political blog by the thoughtful and eloquent Peter Thomas Simon.

I don’t have much to say about this one, for if there’s anyone who can speak for himself, it’s Peter. Click on over and see. This man is legend for having predicted Trump would run for win the Presidency in 2016 on Christmas of 2014, probably beating even Trump.

I know scholars and gentlemen who have called some of his writing as much worth reading as the best-known columnists of the Times. But when it came to calling the defining election of our time, he beat the lot.

(I’ve also had a bit of fun designing the occasional article illustration.) For example:

Web Design, Graphic design, Document Design, Copywriting, Editorial Services, Marketing Consultation
Client: Kirtas Technologies

Ah, Kirtas Technologies.  In some ways my finest hour.

Back in 2008, Kirtas, a multi-million dollar Fortune 100 business and the greatest book digitization firm in the world, whose Google-like stated mission was to digitize all the books ever written, hired me to revamp their web site.

So pleased were they by the results that I got the job of webmaster and graphic designer (as well as sometime copywriter and marketing consultant).  Their clients included people like Microsoft, Yale, the British Library, the University of Moscow, and the Library of Congress, the last few of which were eager for book covers for their millions of neglected classics. For a professional book cover designer like myself, it was a job sent from Heaven.

For this firm I created the greatest web site of my professional life.  It was vast, with well over a hundreds of pages, and spun off two variations for their global market: kirtaseurope.com (led by Netherlander Marcel Alderwald); and kirtasmaghreb.com, my first web site in Arabic.  

The three interrelated sites eventually stretched to over five hundred pages and thousands of associated files, took on multiple language and e-commerce capabilities, and included an extensive secure Extranet. I found myself training an assistant webmaster, and settled down to what looked like a long happy future of web site maintenance and book cover artistry. And then…

And then the global economy collapsed, the company laid off a third of the work force, the entire marketing department vanished in a puff of smoke, management changed hands, and I departed for elsewhere, as the firm as a whole passed into, not quite oblivion, but very different management.  My work faded into pixel heaven with it.

And some of that work was rather nice. Some of the book covers I did there are available on my Book Covers page, but here are just a few web page headers:

Sigh. One of the sad things about being in web design is that every few years (sometimes every few weeks), management wants a ‘fresh look’, and a perfectly good if not spectacular and effective web site vanishes into digital oblivion.  Your best work is not only gone but leaves no trace.  Thus there’s no grand Kirtas web site out there any more that I can point you to, only to scraps like the above. And my focus is no longer web sites at all, but ghostwriting (although I still do the occasional book cover.)

Still, it was a pleasure to have had a chance to do major work for a major client.  It stretches you.

Web design, Copywriting, Internet marketing
Client: DTN Security Services

Kirtas is gone, but DTN Security is still there, online and off. Not surprisingly, for this firm’s been protecting thousands of Rochester homes and families for nearly fifty years, and has served clients ranging from the Ginna Nuclear Plant, the US Navy, the US Marines, Arby’s, Pizza Hut, Marriott, and even its competitors.

Web Design, Web Copy
Client: Caring Hands For Angels

Every year in Rochester children die as they’re being born. Two hundred of those children, who come so briefly into the world, do so in such crushing poverty that the parents or family can’t easily afford a burial gown for the child.

Caring hands for angels is a group of people who sew and provide such gowns. There is no charge. But there is a need for people with sewing and organizational skills, and a crying need for donations of suitable material. Sometimes brides will donate their wedding gowns, but of course such donations can be sporadic.

If people were aware of the work that Caring Hands For Angels was doing, more help might be given. So I was contacted and asked if I could donate a web site that would let members and the public know about the organization. I did, of course.

Sadly, the need for further help and donations is ongoing. Should you have suitable material to contribute, or wish to help or donate in other ways, please feel free to visit the site and contact the — fine and compassionate — people behind it: www.CaringHandsForAngels.com.

Web Designs
Clients: Various

Here a web site, there a web site, everywhere a web site. A little potpourri of designs gone by…

Book Creation, Web Design, Web Copy, Ad Copy, Powerpoint, Brochure, Document Design
Client: Real Estate (Various)

After 2010 I got into real estate and spent a few years working with a number notable realtors and real estate entrepreneurs, ghostwriting books and creating full-blown real estate seminars —even giving talks myself at a few. I even became a licensed real estate agent personally at one point.

There is literally no aspect of writing, marketing and design that isn’t touched on somewhere in real estate. A particular ego boost was designing for billboards. There’s just something about seeing your design work hundreds of feet across soaring into the sky as you drive by it on the expressway at sixty! Here’s on I saw fly by me on on Western NY Interstate 390:

Web Design
Client: Cryonics Society

The shape of things to come — and the poignance of what might have been.

Every now and then a marketer likes to take on the impossible. My marketing work for the Cryonics Institute and then the Cryonics Society is a case in point — the sort of thing that only a fool takes on. But then it is precisely that kind of challenge that inspires one’s to do one’s best.

My work for the former organization tripled membership after two decades of — dare I say? — glacial torpor, and the FAQ I did for the Cryonics Institute led Philip Alexander, to my mind the finest copywriter in Canada, to graciously tell me it was the finest copywriting he’d seen since Ogilvy. He overstated, and revision has much tarnished the once Elgin marble. But at the time I strove like hell to truly nail it, and I did nail it, and remain proud.

The Cryonics Society? It has never found the patrons or supporters to lift it to the heights it deserves in its own exceptional niche; but it endures too, waiting for the visionary venture capitalist who is ready to transform the world.

You, perhaps?

Lately? I’ve been doing a bit of teaching. I got into cryptocurrency, and have given a few talks about it here and there. After doing so, I was allowed to to give a talk on my first love, psychology, at the Osher Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The topic was B. F. Skinner and applied behavior analysis. It was a joy.

I have been writing a long time, and over the years the field, and my skills, have evolved. I began as a graphic designer, marketing copywriter, then became an advertising copywriter, then a magazine writer, then a web designer and web copy supplier, then a book cover designer, then an occasional ghostwriter supplying blog posts and political speeches, and then a writing teacher, and then a ghostwriter producing full-length books for business and other clients. Quite an evolution.

Not everything I’ve done involves writing. (Which is why I’ve put my straight design work (logos and such), and the book covers, on their own pages.)

But I am primarily a ghostwriter. Everything else I’ve done feeds into that skill, and it’s given me a marketing perspective, design sense, publishing savvy, and business and life experience that I like to think gives my ghostwriting services unique capacities not available elsewhere

So if anything you see makes you think of a project you may have in mind, — just give me a call.

You can reach me at (585) 434-7067 or email me at davidpascal@gmail.com.

Thanks for stopping by.