Layout/Cover Art on HOH2

[Quad_Damage]

Case in Point: look at the hideous cover they chose for GSIH... that one guy made three unbelievably awesome and professional-looking covers, but they chose some cartoony clip-art cover instead. They just don't care.

Posts like this are trying to help by offering insight from the consumer's point of view... ya know, the people helping to make the publishers millionaires. Mason acts like the OPs are calling his mother a slut.

[Mason Malmuth]

I always find it interesting the way some new poster shows up and starts these attacks. As we announced at the time, those covers "by that one guy" are going to be used on our next couple of books.

MM

[jenium]

I have to defend Voltron here! It's not ridiculous whining to want competent design. Harrington is a great and generous poker writer - his thoughts on poker deserve better packaging (not to mention a little copy-editing).
Harrington must be selling hundreds of thousands of copies. The profit margin from a fraction of that could be used to hire a designer and editor which would have made his books brilliant inside and out. To me, it's just sad that this opportunity was missed. Some people might not care, but some of us sincerely do, and at least in my case it's not because I want to prove my superior aesthetic taste (honestly!) It just hurts to look at the book, like pins in the eyeballs. It's not too late, im sure the books are selling out- they can fix it for future editions.
It's time vs. quality. My book, Chess Bitch looks gorgeous, but it took my publishers forever to go from manuscript to galley. I'm sure that two plus two wanted to get HOH2 out to make sure WSOP qualifiers could calculate their Ms in time for side events + big one. Not to mention offering us all some light beach reading.
Did anyone see Online poker for Dummies? I flipped through this one in B+N....must have the worst poker advice I've ever seen.

[LLKOOLK1]

I dont get it...Im not reading a book because it has a "cool" cover. I think the HOH series is one of, if not the most, complete description of tournemnet hold em strategy available, and I dont care if it had a shirtless picture of Phill Helmuth on the cover. These complaints are a waste of peoples time.
-LL

[AJo Go All In]

i agree with the comments.

[Voltron87]

I'm not trying to attack 2p2, it's constructive criticism so you can put out a better product. If you guys never put out books or started this site, I would be nowhere near the poker player I am now, I'm not a detractor or a person who dislikes 2p2.

[Quad_Damage]

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[Hold'me]

Let's be honest with ourseleves, the binding for 2+2 books is terrible and Voltron makes plenty of good points. The cover price for 2+2 books is $29.95, do you really think the casual poker player and average consumer at say B&N would want to pay that much for a shabby looking textbook?

I understand 2+2 is all about the quality inside the books but from a pure marketing perspective you have everything to gain in making your books more aesthetically pleasing and durable. Please take some of these suggestions into consideration Mason.

[Siegmund]

[ QUOTE ]
Let's be honest with ourseleves, the binding for 2+2 books is terrible

[/ QUOTE ]

Wellll. There's good news and bad news here. There ARE worse ways to make books - I haven't had trouble with pages coming spilling out of 2+2 books after they've been read through a couple times or even after they've been bounced around on several trips over the course of a year or two.

That said, the thing that struck me about HOH2 is that the book seemed to be literally bulging at the seams.. it "looks the same size" as the 250-page 2+2 books but is 450... represents pretty much the extreme limit for how much you can pack into a book that's printed and bound this way. Feels like a lead brick when you pick it up for the first time. (That's a good thing.) HOH2 becomes shopworn more easily - I've had them arrive from the publisher already with warped or wavy pages, since many thin sheets take on a new shape more readily than thicker pages do. (And, as such, it's a bargain among poker books, more than twice the "information per dollar" as 7CSFAP - I regard 7CSFAP and GTAOT as horrendously overpriced, but HOH2 as pretty good value for money.)

It does mean that if 2+2 puts out more books the size of HOH2 they may need to look at a new binding process.

Cover art, all a matter of taste. HEPFAP/7CSFAP had a common theme that was carried through with SSHE. TOP and HEPFAP show their age, outwardly looking much the same now as when they were new. I personally liked the cover of HOH2 (and didn't like the cover of GSIH) but it wouldn't have stopped me from looking through either book.

Now, the Jacobs and Brier "How Good is Your Limit Holdem?" has some good hands in it ... but THAT is a book that I wouldn't have given a second look in a bookstore, between the ugly gaudy cover and the cheap newsprintlike paper.

[AliasMrJones]

Voltron's points are valid. Also, why red????? SSH was red and HOH vol. 1 was blue in a very similar looking format. I used to call them the "red book" and "blue book" amongst friends. Now there is another "red book" and my system is blown. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]