Not all that it seems...!
Imagine my excitement upon receiving an email from Amazon last week to notify me that the ‘ACT! for Dummies’ book (@actguru ) which I ordered 11 months ago in Feb 2011 had finally been shipped!
Karen Fredricks had (presumably) returned from her sabbatical or whatever had delayed the long-awaited release of the next iteration of her popular Dummies guides… We would finally be in a position to offer a tome-like publication to our clients with a penchant for paper, engineered around the latest ACT! version. Celebration!
Imagine my disappointment therefore, upon removing from the cardboard not ACT! for Dummies (as in ‘Advanced Contact Tracking’) but ACT for Dummies (as in ‘American College Test’).
There is some good news here however; the book we received is considerably larger than a typical Karen Fredricks guide – both dimensionally and in the number of pages (498 excluding the index). Further to this, in the back of the book is a list of other useful titles that may find their way into my shopping cart such as ‘Anger Management for Dummies’ and ‘Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies’.
Best of all though – and having had to wait 11 months for the wrong book to arrive, this did go some way to assuage my displeasure – shipping was free!
Anybody with enough spare time on their hands to have read this far will be pleased to note that there is a solution to the problem on the horizon; Karen Fredricks is alive and well and working in a Fish & Chip Shop with Elvis…. Well, that’s not quite true – but she is alive and well and has just co-authored (with Roy Laudenslager) two new ACT! books (hurrah!):
Sage ACT! 2012 Cookbook and Sage ACT! Dashboard and Report Cookbook
Pre-releases have been sent to BluebirdCRM where they are currently being read on evenings when there isn’t too much on the telly (we’ve been asked to write some reviews). Early indications are positive; we particularly like the reporting and dashboard content earning a tome of its own, and the easy-to-read Fredricks style is still pervasive throughout both manuals.
Not part of the ‘Dummies’ range any more – which will hopefully avoid further confusion with Lisa Zimmer Hatch’s American College Test masterpiece – but well designed, presented and illustrated and promising to be the new standard in user-oriented supportive literature for Sage ACT!
Expect to see further BluebirdCRM blog postings/Tweets on this subject as we form our more insightful opinions over the next week or two.
In the meantime…. For Sale: 1 x ACT for Dummies Guide (for anybody in the US with offspring headed for College but needing further encouragement, you’ll find nothing better to beat yourself over the head with than this!)
Further information:
Sage ACT! 2012 Cookbook: http://www.packtpub.com/sage-act-2012-cookbook/book
Sage ACT! 2011 Dashboard and Report Cookbook: http://www.packtpub.com/sage-act-2011-dashboard-and-report-cookbook/book
