ClosenesswithoutthroughTactics
What you lose when you win people over.
Leon Köllerwirth Hlihel · Non-fiction · Manuscript being finalised
Carnegie taught how to win people over. This book asks what you lose doing it: whoever produces an outcome knows less afterwards about what would have happened without them. Leon Köllerwirth Hlihel takes Carnegie's thirty rules as a touchstone and puts two questions to each – does it still work when the other person knows it, and can they say no? – in a world where text hides the tone, platforms read along and machines phrase empathy. Few rules hold, and only in reverse: they do not create effect, they limit it. Not a self-help book but non-fiction you can use – for everyone who wants not to be liked but to be known.
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.
For readers: if you would like to hear when the book is out, drop me a line.