Please note that because I’m not directly involved with foreign editions, this page is most likely out of date. The best thing to do is ask your local bookseller if a translation is available. Read more about Steal Like An Artist in English.
I’ve been working on a new book since last July. Back in October I wrote, “I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens.” Ha.
I made a promise to Owen before he was born that I would not use him as an excuse to fail at The Thing I needed to do.
Oh sure, I would use him as an excuse for plenty of other things I didn’t want to do, like answer emails or attend various social functions, but I would not use him as an excuse to give up on The Thing.
Writers are constantly looking for excuses not to write, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a man who blames his family for not being able to write.
This is not to say that I wasn’t worried about becoming that pathetic father. Oh, I worried.
Right after Owen was born and we were still in the hospital, this woman got on Twitter and sent me half a dozen tweets about how she just knew Steal was written by somebody without kids, and just you wait, mister. She then proceeded to quote passages from the book, followed by little ejaculations like, “Ha! Try that when you’re up at 3 a.m. with a crying baby!”
Now, I have been on the internet a long time. I get a lot of emails from people who are, as far as I can tell, sad, awful, or completely insane. I have a pretty good firewall that filters what I let get to me.
This woman got to me.
It is one thing to have The Asshole in your brain, it is another thing to have a stranger hold a megaphone up to it and let it shout.
That woman’s tweets haunted me for that first month of survival mode, where it’s a great day if you get a shower, a hot meal, and a few hours of sleep. Maybe this really is it, I thought. Maybe it really is all over.
Now I’m on the other side of it all, and it hasn’t been easy getting back into the swing of The Thing — in fact, it’s been way harder than I expected. But I’d like to tell all would-be parents (and especially dads!) out there:
Don’t listen to these parents. They are using the precedent of their failures to predict your own.
For every tired, overworked, bitter parent who tells you how much you won’t get done when you have kids, there’s a parent like John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who talks about cradling his son in one arm, and picking out melodies on the piano with the other. Or George Saunders, who stole time from his office job for seven years to write the stories that would become CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. Or any number of moms and dads who make it work and make the work. They are out there. Find them. Hang out with them. Ask them how they do it. Let them be your role models.
Jung said, “Nothing has a stronger influence…on their children than the unlived life of the parents.”
You owe your kid food, safety, and love, but you also owe him your example. You give up on The Thing, and then when the kid grows up, he might give up on His Thing, too.
So don’t give up on The Thing.
Download the cover and other images in the blogger kit.
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:
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.
#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
“Kleon’s manifesto about sharing your creative process rather than just the final product becomes even more relevant in 2025 as audiences crave genuine, behind-the-scenes content. The book’s practical strategies for documenting your work and building an audience through transparency offer a refreshing counterpoint to the polished, AI-generated content flooding our feeds. It’s a reminder that human vulnerability and imperfection can be your greatest assets.”
—Forbes
“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
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.
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 site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.