Book Review: Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

Austin Kleon's first book Steal Like An Artist teaches you how to be creative. In his new book Show Your Work, he teaches you how to promote yourself, a book he says is "for people who hate the very idea of self promotion".

Covered in the book are 10 ideas that you can use to promote yourself or think about promotion, or marketing. This book is essentially a feel-good read. The ideas themselves are might be common knowledge to some but they work because I use them myself too prior to reading this book.

The problem with the book is it doesn't go into depth, or talk about actionable steps that you can do to follow through with the ideas. So the 10 ideas will get you in the right direction, as to how you get there, you'll have to figure it out yourself.

I spent two hours reading the book and feel quite inspired by the stories or other people's success. But after reading, that inspiration sort of died down and I don't see any reason to refer back to the book. It will be nice if you can borrow this book instead — I'll be putting my copy in my local library. The 10 ideas do make a good wallpaper though.

There are questionable suggestions, such as reading obituaries every day so that you can avoid wasting your time like those who died. The author says exercising relaxes the mind and opens it up for new thoughts, and if you hate exercise, you should get a dog to help you exercise. And if you really hate exercise, the dog is just going to suffer with you. Those are just some minor nitpicks.

I too have an advice for promoting yourself. Share your work online, daily, regardless of whether they are good or bad. Even if they are bad, you'll improve over time because you're constantly practising and comparing with your past self. I've seen a great deal of artists who just keeps on going at it, sharing stuff online and today, they have a large fan base and that really opens up more opportunities for them.

This book gets a 3 out of 5 stars from me.

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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