The Underground Publisher's Seven-Book Shelf

TL;DR: One person doing every job needs a shelf that covers influence, systems, resistance, sharing, and staying upright for years at a stretch. Mine keeps seven: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, Keep Going, The War of Art, Permission Marketing, Influence, and The E-Myth Revisited.

Most business libraries are staged hostage photos.

The spines promise scaling and domination and acceleration and a morning routine requiring a cold lake and no dependents, and the author photo shows a jaw like a filing cabinet, and the whole shelf is horseshit dressed for a conference. I own seven books that aren’t. They sit on the business shelf of a house where I’m the writer, the editor, the publisher, the storefront, the mailing list, and the guy who answers the mail, running on ten pills a day for a catalog I mostly give away free.

That’s the whole staff. The job is easy to describe and a bastard to repeat: make something worth reading, find the people who want it, deliver it, collect enough money to keep going, and stay human standing next to the machinery.

I keep the shelf short on purpose. Every book on it has to survive a bad week, meaning it has to say something I can use with one hand while the other one is doing the actual job, and most of what gets sold as business writing folds under that. Seven books cover most of the damage.

Kleon and Pressfield handle the part where nothing gets written

Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist takes the weight of immaculate originality off your chest. Study a lineage, take the mechanism instead of the surface, then run it through your own constraints until it comes out crooked and yours. That’s how every guide in my catalog got built, and I’ve never pretended otherwise.

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art gives avoidance a name: Resistance. Said too loud and too often, the diagnosis curdles into macho theater, and there’s a whole cottage industry of men who quote it at you while shipping not one goddamn page.

Its working use is plain. Expect the force that makes reorganizing the pantry feel urgent the second the draft turns dangerous. If that force has been winning lately, you’re still an amateur walks the same ground with less scripture on it.

Kleon’s Keep Going handles the longer problem. A career has weather in it, and the whole prescription is daily practice and seasons and rest and the boring routine that’s still standing there after inspiration spends its advance and skips town. That one stays on the near end of the shelf where I can reach it without standing up.

Three books about getting the work in front of a human

Show Your Work! asks you to put the process out in small pieces instead of surfacing only when there’s something to sell. Promotion turns into evidence of labor. The warning about becoming human spam ought to be nailed above every scheduling tool ever built, in letters big enough to read from the fucking parking lot.

Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing explains why an email address somebody hands you is worth more than attention you rented by the hour. One goes with you. Permission deepens with contact worth opening, and it evaporates the minute you treat it as a license to interrupt a person forever, and it does not come back, and the graveyard of dead newsletters is full of operators who found that out one send too late.

I’ve said my piece about the landlord problem in rent the reach, own the readers. Godin got there decades before I did and charged less for it.

Robert Cialdini’s Influence lays out the machinery running inside every offer you’ve ever read: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity, and, in the expanded edition, unity. Read it for defense as much as sales. Half the value is clocking which lever a stranger is pulling on you before your hand is already in your pocket.

Gerber tells you that you’re the bottleneck

Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited separates doing the technical work from building the thing that delivers it. A writer can produce a good book and have no repeatable way to edit, package, sell, update, or support one.

I’m the single point of failure in this operation. One set of hands, one bad week, one bad reaction to whatever they’ve swapped into the ten-pill lineup this quarter, and the shop goes dark and the mail stacks up and the orders sit there blinking, and there ain’t a soul to call.

The franchise language grates like a wire brush against anything resembling art. I skip half the book and steal the rest.

Checklists save your attention for judgment. Templates stop the recurring chores from eating a Tuesday whole. A documented process means the work survives you getting sick, or forgetting what worked six months back.

The system exists to serve the work, and the day it starts demanding content to justify its own existence, take a wrench to it. I wrote built so you can leave about that and I’m still not running half of what’s in it.

The shelf is short on everything that isn’t business

The rest of what I know about this job came off a shelf with no business books on it at all.

None of the seven teaches you what a person sounds like when they’re lying. Fiction does. Fiction gives you pace and human motive and the sound of somebody working an angle three sentences before they admit to it, and no chapter on positioning has ever gotten within a mile of that.

History gives you the mess that clean frameworks sand off. The repair manual out on my bench gives you sequence, and a torque spec does not care how you feel about it.

Government reports are the strange one. Read enough of them and you pick up that flat bureaucratic register that can walk you across forty pages of disaster without ever locating one human being who caused it, and once you can hear it you hear it everywhere, in press releases and terms of service and the letter telling you your claim has been adjudicated.

Folklore covers what’s left. The things a community believes out loud while swearing it believes nothing.

A publisher who reads only publishing advice ends up producing advice about publishing advice, and the shelf turns into a hall of mirrors with excellent funnels, and that’s how you get a whole damn industry selling each other the same map. Right now I’m sliding Gerber back into the gap on the shelf and going to answer the mail myself.

Sources

• Austin Kleon: Books
• Influence at Work: Principles of persuasion
• Joe Forrest’s Business & Marketing library

Frequently asked questions

Which book should an independent publisher read first?

Start with whatever’s broken. Steal Like an Artist for creative paralysis, Show Your Work! when nobody knows you exist, The E-Myth Revisited when the operation is running you.

Are these books only for writers?

No. Musicians, artists, small product makers, anybody running a one-person shop is fighting the same problems with different tools.

Why include books outside publishing?

Publishing problems are attention problems, behavior problems, system problems, story problems, and endurance problems. A shelf that only covers the industry misses most of that.