DMA#53: "Don't Call It a Recap" with Austin Kleon

Over Austin Kleon’s shoulder, the whole time we talked, Lynda Barry watched us.

Not the actual Lynda Barry; an original manuscript page from Cruddy, hanging on his studio wall next to an outtake from Making Comics. He calls them his Guardian Spirits, and the plan is to keep adding to them until he’s got a full pantheon of demigods looming over his desk.

I understand the impulse completely. I’ve got a drawing of Larry David in my studio that Luke Watson painted for me, and he glares at me every day with an expression that says, “Is that really the version you’re gonna go with? Aeeeeh, it’s prettaaay pretty good.”

This was Austin’s second time on Draw Me Anything, and I’d be lying if I said we covered the book in an orderly fashion. We started with 63 people in the chat and ended with 350, which means roughly 287 people wandered in midstream to find two middle-aged cartoonists arguing about whether Hook is secretly a midlife-crisis film.

It is. More on this later. It gets worse. (Bangarang!)

Don’t Call It a Book Tour

The new book is called Don’t Call It Art, and Austin, a man committed to the bit, named the promotional run for it the Don’t Call It a Book Tour. Previous books got 25-city tours. This one got three cities: Austin, Nashville and Cleveland, which he described as “kind of like a straight shot to Cleveland type tour.”

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He slept in five beds in six days. “This is a young person’s game,” he said, and every comedian who’s ever done the road nodded so hard the vertebrae in their necks audibly clicked. The week after a launch, he told me, all the things that keep you alive as a creative person, the sleep, the walks, the daily ritual, go straight out the window. The man who wrote the book on sustainable creative practice blew himself out promoting a book about sustainable creative practice. “I wish the books worked on me better,” he said, which might be the most honest thing anyone has ever said on this series.

Nobody Knows Anything, Confidently

We got into the publishing industry, which Austin summarised via William Golding’s old line that nobody knows anything: true of Hollywood, true of books. Nobody in publishing knows what sells books, he said, “but they’ll say something confidently to you about it.” Everyone’s chasing BookTok, which is lightning in a bottle, on purpose, which is not how lightning or bottles work.

The only thing that actually sells a book, he said, quoting Ann Patchett, is one person holding it up and saying I love this. Word of mouth. That’s it. That’s the whole machine.