Chargeback

I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:

===

CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.

A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”

===

In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.

​​And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.

I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.

I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.

Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.

I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.

Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.

So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.

​​And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.

Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.

So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.

So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.

Magic trick vs. miracle in email copywriting

I’m reading a book about magic and showmanship. One part explains the difference between a magic trick and a miracle:

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, is a magic trick.

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, when you are starving, is a miracle.

This isn’t just for magicians, of course.

It’s also a key idea for email copywriting. It’s super important to hold on to. That’s why I put the above idea, in my own words, as the core tenet of my Simple Money Emails course, and why I repeat it from page 2 of the course until the end.

So if:

* You have an email list but you are not writing emails and therefore are not making any money from your list, while your subscribers forget who you are and why they signed up in the first place

* You are writing emails but nobody is buying from you, meaning that your newsletter is really just a hobby and not a marketing channel

* You futz and fiddle for hours just to write one stupid email, instead of producing something interesting and effective in just 20 minutes…

… then my Simple Money Emails course could appear in your life like a hand-and-cheese sandwich in a time of great famine.

​​For more information about this miraculous course:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Take your likes to the bank

A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!

The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.

First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.

And then he wrote:

===

So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.

Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.

And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.

I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.

Keep up the good work,

Your grateful student and zealous reader,

Jakub

===

I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.

In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:

It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.

Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.

A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.

People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.

Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.

They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.

It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.

Except you kind of can.

True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.

But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.

So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.

Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.

Sales pages are one place.

But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.

Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.

I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.

Maybe I will fix that in time.

For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Curious George creates a course

It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

===

Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

===

The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html

I was wrong yesterday, and I will do it again

Yesterday, I talked to the self-proclaimed dinosaur of direct marketing, Brian Kurtz, about doing a presentation to his Titans XL mastermind.

Brian and I agreed that I’d give a talk to his group some time early next year. The topic will be… email, of course, but more specifically, engagement in email.

(I’ve been told by various people that I should take all the different tricks I use to tease out and engage my readers and put them together into a training. So that’s what I will do in front of Brian’s group.)

This morning, as I was standing in the shower, pretty much the entire presentation came together in my head.

I carefully stepped out of the shower, toweled myself off not very well, and tiptoed to a notebook to write all the ideas down.

I won’t share the whole thing here — you’ll have to be there in Brian’s Titans group when I give it live.

But I will tell you one way I spark and kindle engagement.

It’s something you can do today. It’s something that might not come naturally to you, but that you can force in the interest of creating more interesting content.

And that’s to be wrong.

The more often you are wrong, the more engagement you will get.

For example, yesterday I wrote an email about “The most famous copywriter, real or fictional.”

I did so knowing that, whoever I named, I would be certain to omit others. And I got replies telling me so:

#1: “The world famous rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) was also working as a copywriter before he became a rapper. He even has an episode about it in his HBO show Dave.”

#2: “Elmore Leonard also has copywriting background. His novels are amazing.”

#3: “Salman Rushdie – 8.34 million results :)”

#4: “Did you know that Chandler also becomes a copywriter in season 9 of Friends?”

I did not know. Any of that. But now I know.

You might say these replies aren’t pointing out that I’m wrong. And you might be right.

The replies above are all helpful, playful, looking to complete my incomplete message from yesterday.

But I still say the same underlying psychology of correcting somebody who’s wrong applies.

​​In fact, I insist on it.

And if you don’t agree with me, then you can always hit reply and tell me so.

Meanwhile, you might like my Most Valuable Email course. Why? Because it’s most valuable.

I know a thing or two thousand about writing daily emails. That’s one of the reasons I can go in front of an experienced group like Brian’s Titans mastermind and still tell them something new.

And one thing I know is that my Most Valuable Email tricks produces emails that I personally find most fun to write. And maybe most fun for readers to read.

​​​If that turns you on, here’s how you can start writing your own Most Fun Emails in an hour from now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The most famous copywriter, real or fictional

On Dan Heath’s new podcast, “What It’s Like To Be,” I heard Dan asking a TV meteorologist, a criminal defense lawyer, a forensic accountant, all the same question:

“Who’s the most famous meteorologist/criminal defense lawyer/forensic accountant, real or fictional?”

This got me wondering who the most famous copywriter might be, real or fictional.

I had a gut feeling. I double-checked via simple Google search, by looking at the total number of results.

As far as real copywriters go, there’s really only one possible option for a copywriter that a rando off the street might know.

​​That’s David Ogilvy.

There’s something about the pipe, the smart suits, the English disdain, the French castle.

Sure enough, Ogilvy was the only real copywriter who has more than 1M indexed Google results about him.

As for fictional copywriters, it depends on who you consider a copywriter.

Don Draper, the creative art director from the TV show Mad Men, clocks in at over 2M Google results.

But was he really a copywriter or more of an idea man? I’ll let you decide.

Meanwhile, the most famous, fictional, 100% copywriter that I’ve been able to find is Peggy Olson, also a character on Mad Men, who only gets around 220k Google results.

Should we stop there? Oh no.

It turns out several celebs out there have a copywriting background… but are not today known as copywriters.

One of these is novelist James Patterson. Before Patterson set out to write 200 books (and counting), he was a copywriter and later the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, one of the biggest and oldest ad agencies in the world.

Patterson has 6M+ Google results to attest to his fame.

And if we’re already going with celebrities who have copywriting in their history, and maybe their blood, then we get to the most famous copywriter of all time, real or fictional, live or dead, even though nobody nowhere would identify him as a copywriter.

I’m talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald worked for a time as a copywriter before becoming the author of the quintessential great American novel, The Great Gatsby, and later a topic of almost 13M Google results.

So there. Now you know. And now you might ask yourself, “What did I just read? Did I really need this in my life? How did I wind up at the bottom of this email?”

If any of those questions is flitting through your head, let me point out that interest in famous people seems to be hardwired into our brains.

Tabloid writers and sales copywriters know this fact well, and they use it over and over and over. Because it works to draw attention and get people reading, day after day.

That’s a free lesson in copywriting.

For more such lessons, including ones that you might not be able to shrug off by saying, “I guess I knew that,” you will have to buy my Copy Riddles course.

The whole big idea behind Copy Riddles is the appeal of famous people — at least famous in the small niche of direct response copywriting.

I mean, on the sales page, in place of a subheadline, what I have is a picture featuring Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of them celebrities in the micro world of direct response, all of them paid off on that page as being integral to the course.

If you’d like to buy Copy Riddles, or if you simply want to read some gossip about famous copywriters, then head here and get ready to be amazed and shocked:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The Day After 40 years later

Today being November 20, 2023, it is the 40th anniversary of the airing of the most influential movie you have never heard of.

The movie is called The Day After. It aired on ABC on November 20, 1983.

A few unusual things about this movie:

1. It was direct to TV, and never shown in theaters

2. It was depressing

3. It helped prevent nuclear war

The plot in a nutshell follows several different people around Kansas City and small surrounding towns. They go about their idyllic Midwestern lives, while in the background the radio reports increasing tensions between the US and USSR over some dispute in East Germany.

People stop to listen to the news, but shrug it off and say it won’t come to anything.

That afternoon, they see ICBMs launched from underground missile silos around Kansas City. A short while later, several nuclear bombs are detonated over Kansas City itself.

What follows is “the day after”:

A few survivors huddle together among ruins and charred corpses, while their hair falls out and their skin peels off, the result of rotting from inside, courtesy of the high levels of radiation in the air.

Things go from bad to worse, and then the movie ends. ​​I told you it was depressing.

When The Day After aired on ABC, it was watched by over 100 million people. At the time, it was the most-watched TV movie in history.

Before The Day After was shown to the public, it was screened for President Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After the movie finished, the generals sat there petrified, without saying anything.

​​After Reagan saw it, he supposedly said, “not on my watch.” In his memoirs, he drew a direct line between watching The Day After and signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the USSR.

The incredible thing was that this piece of American Propaganda was so effective that it was shown in the Soviet Union as well.

​​The producers of the movie insisted the movie be shown in the USSR in its original form, without any changes or commentary. The Soviets agreed.

​​The Day After aired there in 1987. While it’s not known exactly how many millions watched it, it can be presumed that they all ended up depressed.

I’m telling you about this movie because it’s culturally and historically significant. But if you must have your persuasion and influence takeaway, then consider the most obvious and most powerful one.

Look at the impact on Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

​​Imagine them sitting in a darkened room, staring mutely at images of rubble where Kansas City used to stand, as the final message rolled across the screen:

“The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in a full-scale nuclear war. It is our hope that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that fateful day.”

Was the stuff in this movie any kind of news to them?​​

If anybody should have known what nuclear war would really mean in terms of actual impact and human cost, you would think that top Army brass and the President of the United States would be it.

And maybe they did know, on an intellectual level. But didn’t really see it, didn’t really feel it.

It took a dramatic, visual presentation to get it into their heads, and to change their attitudes.

And maybe that’s why I had to tell you about this depressing movie from 40 years ago, instead of simply repeating, “We are wired for story” or “You gotta a paint a picture in people’s minds.”

That’s all for today.

If you’re curious, here’s the TV trailer for The Day After. It lasts all of a minute and 32 seconds. Watch it, shudder, and when you think of it in the future, think of what I told you today:

The unsexiest sales funnel Broadway has ever seen

On November 29, 2018, I sent an email to this marketing list with the subject line, “The worst aromatherapy book Broadway has ever seen.”

The topic of that email was the launch of my new aromatherapy book, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide.

At that time, my marketing list had exactly 2 readers — me and some other dude who had somehow found me.

On the other hand, my aromatherapy list had a staggering 814 readers. But over the next 6 weeks, my aromatherapy would grow still more, to well over 2,000 readers. These were quality new readers, and getting them cost me nothing net.

How?

Well, I’ll tell ya. But I don’t think you will be happy. It’s nothing new, and nothing magical. Here’s what I did:

1. I “wrote” a second little ebook, titled “Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams.” The title was a flat-out swipe of Gary Bencivenga’s Little Black Book of Secrets.

I put “wrote” in quotes because there was almost no writing involved. I basically repurposed a dozen “what never to” emails I had already written to my aromatherapy list — warnings about unsafe use, shady sellers, dangerous oils, etc.

​​I put those emails into a Pages document, exported as PDF, and tacked on a black-and-red cover I’d made in Canva.

2. I ran a FB ad campaign giving this EO scams ebook away if people signed up to my list. I know nothing about running FB ads, and I’m sure this ad campaign was far from optimal.

3. I sent daily emails to my aromatherapy list with a pitch to buy the $10 Quick Start ebook. Enough new people, who had signed up via the Little Black Book ad, bought the Quick Start book to offset all the costs I had from the FB ads.

And that’s it. That’s how I grew my list from 800 readers to over 2,000 qualified readers in about 45 days.

I know, about as sexy as a potato. But what to say?

If you want to grow your list quickly and even without cost, then consider doing the same. Run ads to some kind of attractive and relevant giveaway in exchange for people opting in to your list, and write daily emails that sell something to offset the ad cost.

At this point, it would make sense to try to sell you my Simple Money Emails course, which is all about writing simple daily emails that make sales. In that course, I even include some examples emails from the aromatherapy list I had years ago.

But with all the promotion of SME over the past few weeks, I believe everyone who was going to get this course during this lunar cycle now already owns it. So let me just remind you to go apply what I show you inside that course.

Meanwhile, I no longer write anything in the aromatherapy space and I no longer sell any offers there.

But I am proud of my little Quick Start Essential Oil Guide, and I still stand by it.

​​I put a lot of work into researching and writing it, and if you are interested in essential oils, I believe it’s the perfect introduction.

​​If by chance you want it, PayPal me $10 to john@bejakovic.com, and I’ll send you the PDF.

The psychology of being an idiot

In reply to my email yesterday, a puzzled reader wrote in to ask:

===

How did you initially start your list? Like to get those first few people in the door. I feel like we’ve never been told your origin story to how this list became to be what it is.

Maybe I’m wrong, I’ve only been reading for 2 years, though your list is older then that. And I don’t even know how I got here.

===

I’ve been reading a lot about newsletter growth lately, and the above is a frequent question that comes up.

“How did you get your first few subscribers? Your first 100? Your first 1,000?”

The most common answer I’ve read is, “Oh, at the start, I just asked people in my network if they’d like to sign up.”

That is not what I did. For one, I don’t have a network. For another, I don’t like asking anybody for anything. (They might say no, and then what!)

I started my list over 5 years ago.

​​I checked just now, and it took me 18 months and 5 days from starting daily emailing to my get my first 100 subscribers.

The background of why it took me that long is that I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn, depending on your moral compass.

For the longest time, the only thing I did was write my daily emails, and post them to my website.

I did on a few occasions post something smart and professional in copywriting groups on Facebook. I believe I managed to get two, maybe even three new subscribers that way.

But mainly, I was just grinding away, because like I said, I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn.

My plan was never really to build this email list into anything.

My only vague goal was to get better at writing emails, and to have something to show potential clients as a demonstration of my skill. That was back when I still did client work, which is something I don’t do any more.

And yet, I continue to write daily emails today.

I’m currently reading a book, The Psychology of Money.

It was published a little over three years ago. Today, it has over 43k reviews on Amazon, 32k of them being five-star.

Basically, the book tells you how your own psychology gets in the way of your making money, growing money, and keeping whatever money you’ve managed to make or grow.

None of those are topics I’m interested in at all. But I realized I could make this book more interesting to myself by switching out “money” and switching in “business” or “project.” Suddenly, the lessons became familiar and dear:

– Think long term, and let the power of compounding work for you

– Be okay with a wide range of outcomes

– Realize that you will change — what you think you will value in the future is probably not accurate

So that’s kind of the Bejako origin story, and the explanation of my motivations in driving this newsletter onwards in the way that I do, well into my 6th year with it.

Now, I can imagine that my origin story sounds entirely uninspiring. It’s kind of the opposite of wandering into the wrong room, lingering just a second too long, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider that dropped from the ceiling.

To make up for my uninspiring email today, tomorrow I will tell you a way that, while I still had practically nobody reading this newsletter, I grew another newsletter to a few thousands readers in a matter of weeks, and filled it with quality subscribers.

That’s on tomorrow’s episode of the Bejako Show.

Meanwhile, if you want lessons on success with any long-term project, consider Morgan Housel’s Psychology Of Money, and it’s 32,000 5-star reviews.

​​If you’d like to take a look, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

Flip the script or your life

Time for flip-the-script Friday:

Today I have an ancient story for you. I know, you’re thrilled.

In an attempt to bring your eyes back from their trip to the back of your skull just now, let me preframe this ancient story by saying it could 1) save your life and 2) make you lots of money.

More modestly, maybe this story can simply teach you an important thing about influence.

The hero of our ancient story is a man named Eumenes, a Greek, who started out as a secretary in Alexander’s army.

Eumenes had secretarial ability but he also had strategic ability. He became a successful general in his own right, and invented lots of clever strategems to win battles against much bigger and more experienced armies.

Following Alexander’s death, Eumenes was brought in to keep order in a region of Alexander’s vast empire. The satraps of that region — the Macedonian and Persian governors — all hated each other, constantly bickered, and fought regularly.

The only thing they could agree on was that they hated their new Greek chaperone even more, and wanted him dead.

Now perk up your ears, because here’s an example of Eumenes’s strategic brilliance:

Eumenes knew that he would soon be dead by poison or dagger, unless he somehow dealt with the hatred of the satraps he was brought in to control. So he did the opposite to protect his life from what most people might do.

Instead of trying to win the favor of the satraps who hated him, he pretended to be in need of money. And he borrowed large sums of money from the satraps whom he suspected of being most ready to have him assassinated.

In this way, says the Greek historian Plutarch, Eumenes “secured the safety of his person by taking other men’s money, an object which most people are glad to attain by giving their own.”

Result:

Some time later, an assassination plot indeed formed against Eumenes’s person. But the plot was independently betrayed to Eumenes by two satraps, both of whom were afraid of losing the large sums of money they had lent to him.

So the next time your life is in danger or you are about to be brought down by political intrigue, think of Eumenes. Flip the script, and you might not only survive but thrive.

The end. Except…

As you might know, flipping the script is one of the chapters I am planning in my new 10 Commandments book, tentatively titled, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

But since I’m currently doubling down on my health newsletter, that book is on hold.

The only thing I can therefore offer you today is my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

Here’s one Amazon review to get you curious:

“A quick, easy read with great quotes, a bunch of other books it guides you to read, and evergreen information based on psychology and proven results. It’s got a soft but classy pitch for the author’s newsletter leveraging a bunch of the commandments right there in your face. He practices what he preaches.”

If you’d like to get this quick and rather affordable book now:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments