Back in February, I set up typo bounty for my 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians etc. book. That was in response to a 3-star review I got back then, which said the book is full of typos.
I found that hard to believe, since I had more than a dozen people proofread the book before I published it.
But money can fix many things, and maybe it could find and fix typos my proofreaders had missed?
So I set up the bounty, and announced it to my list.
Since then, thanks to the Herculean efforts of nitpicking readers around the world, I have been clued into 3 legitimate typos in the book. Actually, make that 4, because just this morning I got an email notifying me of one more.
I’ve honored all typo bounty hunters so far, and paid out $5 via PayPal, as promised.
But from this moment on, I am abolishing this typo bounty, for two reasons.
The first is that I have no interest in actually updating the book to fix a few spread-out typos. Amazon makes it a pain to update the manuscript, and I don’t want to mess with it for the sake of changing “Cialidini” to “Cialdini” in one place on page 7 (that’s the typo I was notified of today).
The second reason is that this entire bounty process makes me actively dislike the people who write in to tell me about the typos.
Which, appropriately enough, goes back to most important Commandment of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians etc., a commandment so important, so prime, that I put it at number one, in the first chapter of the book.
If you disobey this prime commandment, it becomes absolutely impossible to influence people to do what you want.
If you obey this commandment, you can perform almost magical feats of persuasion.
You can find Commandment I, and 9 more surprising and valuable commandments, in my book. Beware though, because there are 4 typos there as well, on pages 7, 48, 80, and 136. If that doesn’t scare you off: