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I'd lose the PhD on the cover

Eliot,

I love this site, and I wish you the best with your book. I'm sure it will be a best-seller!

As for the jacket, perhaps you should save your credentials for the inside jacket. Your target audience is the ploppies -- lazy by definition. They want a nice, light read on how to get rich quick in the casinos without work or risk. That's why they buy John Patrick books. The "PhD" after your name hints at something different than the nice, light read they want. For better or worse, that is your target market, and I'm sure you'll want to maximize the EV of this venture.

Here's your typical potential customer. This is a review of BJA2 from Amazon:

Vastly Overrated, November 28, 2002

Reviewer: Ian Duncan Smith (Oregon)
Serious problems with this book:
a)The book is about card counting, yet the author does not provide any details as to a card counting system.

b) It is academically self-indulgent to the point of unreadability. Chapters are glued together from the author's old articles with no cohesion.

c) As the book says, you can spend 500 hours counting cards at blackjack and lose. Kind of pointless don't you think? The fine details of card counting in this book will not help much. You also need a minimum $50,000 dollars to start with.

d) This page and the book itself is liberally sprinkled with comments from blackjack authors, software providers and webmasters all of whom are stablemates or have some financial interest in this book selling & succeeding. Are they all impartial? I very much doubt it.

e) The author calls the book "playing the pros way", yet apparently has some flashy wall st. job. Its easy to make a small fortune at gambling if you start with a large fortune.


I'm sure your publisher will run some marketing numbers to optimize the appeal of the book to the masses. Remember, people do judge books by covers.
 
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