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Show Your Work!

A New York Times bestselling guide to getting discovered. Get a signed copy.

Buy now: Amazon – B&N – IndieBound – Powell’s – BookPeople

Download the cover and other images in the blogger kit.

About the book

ISBN: 9780761178972 | Foreign translations

A book for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion, Show Your Work! is the followup to my New York Times bestselling guide to creativity, Steal Like An Artist. If Steal was a book about stealing influence from others, Show is about influencing others by letting them steal from you.

In ten tight chapters, I lay out ways to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to build an audience by sharing that process, and how to deal with the ups and downs of putting yourself and your work out in the world:

You don’t have to be a genius.
Think process, not product.
Share something small every day.
Open up your cabinet of curiosities.
Tell good stories.
Teach what you know.
Don’t turn into human spam.
Learn to take a punch.
Sell out.
Stick around.

This book is not just for “creatives”! Whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, a student or a teacher, a hobbyist or a professional, it’s time to stop worrying and start sharing.

Praise for the book:

#1 Amazon Bestseller

New York Times Bestseller – Top 100 Best Selling Education Books of 2014

2014 Goodreads Choice Awards – Best Business Book

Brain Pickings Best Art, Design, and Photography Book of 2014

“Some people are natural self-promoters. For others, it’s painfully difficult to put their work out there. In this creatively designed pocket-sized book, Kleon offers the latter group effective strategies that allow them to share their work without leaving their comfort zone…. Kleon’s advice is sassy and spot-on.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[The] subtitle could just as easily be, ‘How to Self-promote Without Being a Jerkface.’ It’s an incredibly useful and compulsively readable short book.”
—Fast Company

“Like Steal, Show is timeless; readers can return to it repeatedly throughout life and still glean useful ideas and tips. It’s a mistake to think this is aimed at young, artsy people, because anyone starting out (or starting over)… will find upbeat encouragement here.”
—Library Journal

“Kleon’s powerful advice makes this small-format book not-at-all little.”
—Booklist

“In this motivating book, packed with smart approaches, ideas and quotes, Kleon teaches us how best to navigate through creative work in the present day… A certain and deserved bestseller.”
—The Bookseller

“A wise, yet always entertaining, guide for the creative in all of us.”
—Largehearted Boy

“Kleon addresses with equal parts humility, honesty, and humor one of the quintessential questions of the creative life: How do you get ‘discovered’? In some ways, the book is the mirror-image of Kleon’s debut — rather than encouraging you to ‘steal’ from others… it offers a blueprint to making your work influential enough to be theft-worthy.”
—Brain Pickings

“A must-read for anyone involved in the creative process.”
—LibraryReads

“It’s not often that I find myself reviewing a book that I can say has already changed my life…. In one concise chapter after another, Kleon takes on the entire range of assumptions artful people tend to make about their own art-making, launching a good-natured assault on fruitless myths, gently dismantling bootless neuroses and finally offering something that adds up to a new vision of creativity, a manifesto for the imagination’s quest to reach fellow human beings.”
—BookPage

“Austin Kleon is one of the brightest new minds on the creative landscape. And Show Your Work! demonstrates why. With simple yet profound insights, and an array of his amazing images, he casts aside old stereotypes of the creative life and tells what it’s really like. You’ll want to share this remarkable book far and wide.”
—Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell Is Human and Drive

Buy it now:

The best salespeople are the ones who are in love.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

The July 20th issue of Publisher’s Weekly featured a piece I wrote about book tour, bookselling, and my newfound love for indie bookstores. Read it here or below.

[Read more…]

New 20×200 print: Steal Like An Artist

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Buy it now?

My artist’s statement:

When Broome Community College in upstate New York asked me to give a speech at their convocation, I sat down and wrote a list of 10 things I wish I’d heard when I was a college student first starting out. That list became the speech, the speech became a popular blog post and the blog post became my second book, Steal Like an Artist. A lot of people have told me they wanted to hang my handwritten list on their wall, so now, almost one year after I wrote it, we’re releasing the list as a print. I hope you hang it somewhere you want to get good work done.

This is my eleventh 20×200 print. See them all?

Steal Across America Tour Diary #4: Portland, Phoenix, and San Francisco

Saturday, May 12, 2012

I’m on book tour promoting Steal Like An Artist. See all upcoming dates or follow me on Twitter?

Portland: Love, love, loved the gloomy weather. Felt like the kind of weather you could actually get some work done in. Ate a ton of Vietnamese food, a Portland Cream from Voodoo Donuts, an incredible soft-shell sandwich at Clyde Common, drank a bunch of Ninkasi IPA, had my first morning TV taping, gave not one but two talks at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, saw the great John Frame show at the Portland Museum of Art, added a signed copy of Steal to the great library at the Heathman Hotel, shopped Powell’s and the excellent Reading Frenzy, and hung out with a bunch of my friends.

Phoenix: It rained when I was in Phoenix and I had a ton of work to do, so my time there was pretty quiet, but I had some great coal-fire pizza at Pizzeria Bianco, drew Steal in chalk for KPNX, and had a wonderful audience at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe.

San Francisco: I spent four nights in SF and it was my first time in the city, so it probably deserves its own post. Gave a talk at Google, drove around the city with my agent and splendid host, Mr. Ted Weinstein, did the farmer’s market at the Ferry building, walked the Filbert Steps to Coit Tower, window shopped on Valencia Street, drew and gave a talk at Flax Art, ate super burritos and hung out with my friends Lisa, Wendy, Mike, Erika, and Andre, hit the ballpark with the Logsdons, hit City Lights Books, ate a few slices at Golden Boy, had dinner with one of my heroes, the collage artist Winston Smith (that’s a whole story in itself), strolled Chinatown, drank Blue Bottle coffee, drove to Twin Peaks and Golden Gate park, and watched the Pacific.

My Pixar visit could fill up its own post, too. @DrWave gave Ted and me a tour of the campus and the amazing exhibit of Brave pre-production art, then I gave my talk, signed and sold out of books, met another one of my heroes, Steve Purcell, and spent a small fortune in the gift shop.

You can see more from my tour diary or follow along as it happens on Twitter: @austinkleon

On keeping (or not keeping) your day job

Friday, February 24, 2012

Page from chapter 9 of Steal Like An Artist…

* * *

I’ve been nervous about this announcement, but here goes: today is my last day as a copywriter at Springbox. As of tomorrow, I will be without a day job and without a steady paycheck or salary.

“Keep your day job” is one of the most important (and derided) points in Steal Like An Artist—I truly believe that up until this point, a day job has been a blessing for me. As I write in the book:

A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art. As photographer Bill Cunningham says, “If you don’t take money, they cant tell you what to do.”

While working a full-time job, I’ve written two books, made art, put out prints, given speeches, blogged…I’ve done a lot. And during that time, my wife and I have scrimped and saved and stayed out of debt and kept our overhead really low.

Now I find myself in a spot where I have a book that I truly, truly believe in, a publisher who believes in it, and best of all, from what I’ve been hearing the past couple of days, readers who believe in it. How well this book does will probably determine what my career will look like from here on out.

I hate to quote a fictional character from a sitcom, but last night on Parks and Recreation, the character Ron Swanson had this to say:

Never half ass two things. Whole ass one thing.

And that, my friends, is what I’m doing: I’m whole-assing one thing. I’m giving this book all I have — at least two months of non-stop promotion, art-making, and a 20-city tour. (Sounds like a new day job, huh?)

I don’t know where I’ll end up by this summer. Maybe I’ll be begging you for a new day job, or maybe I’ll be writing the next book. Who knows? All I know is my next move.

Remember: All advice is autobiographical. YMMV: Your mileage may vary. Feel free to break the rules. Make the life you want.

See you on the road.