ClosenesswithoutthroughTactics
What survives of Carnegie's rules once influence is no longer an art.
Leon Köllerwirth Hlihel · Non-fiction · Manuscript complete
Carnegie taught how to win people over. This book asks what you give up doing it. Ninety years after the most famous rules of social effectiveness, Leon Köllerwirth Hlihel tests every one of them against modern psychology – and against a world where text hides the tone, platforms reward displays of concern and machines phrase empathy. Few rules survive, and only inverted: they do not produce influence, they limit it. A book about the one kind of closeness that cannot be optimised.
Six pages from the typeset manuscript. A5, 148 × 210 mm. Two colours carry the whole book: blue opens a part, red opens a chapter and carries each of the nine rules. The colour orders; nothing is highlighted.
A part begins: a blue band, and below it the chapters to come. Its reverse is fully blue — you never turn from colour onto nothing.
A chapter begins: the whole page in red, the text starts opposite. No running head, no folio — only the number and the subject.
Body text. The indent separates narration from spoken line — the filter finds the spoken line itself, it is never marked up.
At most one stopping point per page. Ordinary pages may be almost boringly quiet; the staging belongs to the opener.
Each of the nine rules of limitation gets a page of its own: the numeral large, the sentence beneath it, and the price the rule costs. No rule stands without its price.
For agents and publishers: synopsis and sample chapter on request.