It never used to be a career, picking up women. But here he is, Richard La Ruina, a man whose job is to be “Britain's No 1 superstar chat-up artist”. In the loose-knit online subculture known as the Seduction Community, his nickname is The Gambler, which seems somehow incongruous, given that he was 21 before he even kissed a girl. Still, his uneventful past comes in useful now that he has flowered into a professional pick-up artist - a PUA, as it is referred to in the business.

He has been there, this is his shtick. “I was the guy at social events who everyone asked, 'What's wrong?' or 'Are you OK?'” He knows how it feels to be shy and single, to hang about in bars repelling attractive women with inappropriate body language and unflattering clothes. His transformation from chick repellent to babe magnet gives hope to the lonely and sex-starved. And it is for the benefit of these men that he has devised a “system that enables you to attract and seduce women whom you would consider 'out of your league'”. For hundreds of would-be Don Juans trapped in the bodies of invisible losers, La Ruina is a lifeline.

He is here to give a lecture on his first book, The Natural Art of Seduction. The venue is Miller's Academy, a louche, antique-stuffed, velvet-upholstered place in Notting Hill, London, which usually plays host to shabby intellectuals promoting their thoughts on the gastronomic history of Peru or the non-existence of God. Not that La Ruina is less of a crowd-puller. The place is packed. Some people have even found time to skim through his book: “Practice the alpha stance in your house, see how it looks in the mirror,” it says.

You can also find inspiration in your DVD collection: “I felt a bit of an idiot,” writes La Ruina, “watching The Last Samurai, Meet Joe Black and 24 in front of the mirror, copying facial expressions, but that feeling went away the first time a girl said I looked like a model.”

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Nobody else here tonight looks much like a model. But they can hardly wait for La Ruina to share his thoughts on beautiful young women. A beautiful woman, he writes, is drawn to a man for six reasons: “His alpha maleness, his unflappability, his powerful frame, his leadership, his sexual confidence, his calmness.”

Miller's is packed, as I said. But where is the mob of nerds? La Ruina's target readership and workshop groups are drawn from that section of society inhabited by spoddy, wordless, sometimes borderline-misogynist blokes in black T-shirts. Blokes stuck in their head or in their computers. Blokes who associate the word “woman” with either female avatars or their mothers. Blokes who dream of hot sex with Page 3 pin-ups but fall asleep at night with damp copies of Nuts in their arms.

Nuts readers are thin on the ground this evening, though the evidence suggests that prolonged involuntary celibacy has driven some members of the audience half mad. There are people here so shell-shocked by lack of intercourse that they have forgotten the fundamentals: “Will asking for a phone number affect the whole gameplay?” they want to know.

Others are angry and frustrated. “Everything says don't be the aggressor. But that's what I am in every other aspect of my life. Why not dating?”

Clue: when at one point the word

“spinster” trips from La Ruina's lips, somebody shouts “Here, here!” and everybody cheers. Everybody except La Ruina. Miller's is packed with women.

What are they doing here, these women? Most are single and approaching their forties. A handful have brought along a man “as a joke” but it's not a joke, really, to attend a lecture by a pick-up artist if you would rather not be single and your reproductive organs are questionably fertile.

“There will be heckling,” a blonde says with a twinkle. She knows all about PUAs, having watched the film Magnolia in which Tom Cruise plays Frank T. J. Mackey, “master of the muffin and author of Seduce and Destroy”. Mackey's character is thought to be based on a Canadian PUA who goes by the name of Mystery, one of the Seduction Community's pioneers and the author of How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed.