Game Face: Neil Strauss is back with another pickup book

From The Canadian Press:

"On my first book tour, the audience was filled with the kind of geeks I was used to. On my second book tour, the audience was filled with frat guys," he says. He was even asked to offer training for sales conventions and political candidates (he declined).

Still, giving guys who were down on their luck the keys to the kingdom remained a powerful pull for Strauss. He was getting thousands of e-mails from dudes wanting deliverance, but he couldn’t help them all. Coupled with the fact that the seduction business was booming (the group boot camps that Strauss wrote about in "The Game" that cost US$500 per person now regularly go for $3,000 and more), Strauss came up with his own solution to meet the demand. He hired a staff and kick-started the Stylelife Academy (www.stylelife.com), an online "university" focusing on the art of attraction that charges members $19.95 a week.

Enter Strauss’ latest book and the lawyerly administrations set forth in the beginning. "Rules of the Game" is actually a collection of two books – the aforementioned "Stylelife Challenge" and "The Style Diaries: The Pickup Artist’s Companion," a collection of artfully sketched short tales that outline pitfalls of the game seen through Strauss’ eyes. "The Stylelife Challenge" is a self-help book set up on a 30-day cycle that include daily exercises and field missions for each day.

At first skim, "The Stylelife Challenge" is like most go get ’em books aimed at men: eat right, look people in the eye, brush your teeth, believe in yourself. Strauss concedes that these elements are evergreen, but he points out that what makes this book different is the rigorous testing these attraction tactics have undergone – he claims to have spent five years trying this stuff out on 13,000 men of all different backgrounds.

The missions run from approaching up to five strangers to make small talk to reframing what you do for a living so that it seems exciting. How do you win the challenge? At the end of 30 days, if you’ve completed all the tasks, you should have a date with a real, live girl.

But then what?

Strauss knows that getting the date is just the first step and keeping her in the long run is a whole other story. "The rules of the game are the complete opposite of real relationship rules," Strauss says.

That set of strategy will have to wait for another book.