Reading List

Authors Like Amanda Palmer

On 20 April 2012 Palmer asked the internet to pre-order an album that did not exist yet, and 24,883 people sent her $1,192,793 — at the time the largest sum ever raised for a music project on Kickstarter. In February 2013 she went to TED to explain why, and in November 2014 Grand Central published the book that grew out of it. The Art of Asking is two things bolted together: a memoir of eight years spent standing on a milk crate in Harvard Square in white face paint, of stripping, of a piano-and-drums duo no label wanted, and of the illness of her oldest friend Anthony Martignetti — and an argument that the money follows the relationship rather than the other way round. It was a New York Times bestseller and it was seriously argued with: reviewing it for NPR on 20 November 2014, Annalisa Quinn wrote that in our society certain kinds of people are allowed to ask for things and certain kinds are not, and that the book barely asks who gets heard. Since July 2024 it has also been read against a second story — the allegations against her former husband, the author Neil Gaiman, and the civil suit that named her as well. That is set out with dates further down this page, because it is a live matter and it belongs on the record rather than in the margins. The ten writers below are here for what they do on the page.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Music · The Art of Asking 2014 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Amanda Palmer, the closest match in method is Nick Cave, who runs the same unmediated channel to his audience in reverse — they ask, he answers, every week since 2018. For the musician's memoir at its very best, Patti Smith's Just Kids is the one to read next. For the idea underneath the whole book, go back to Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which made the argument in 1983 and is the more rigorous version of it. For the strongest disagreement, Astra Taylor.

Every book by Amanda Palmer →

10 authors like Amanda Palmer

01
The same channel, reversed · Closest match

Nick Cave

Australian · Faith, Hope and Carnage, with Seán O'Hagan (2022)

Since September 2018 Cave has run The Red Hand Files, a website with no advertising, no comments and no subject he refuses: readers send questions, hundreds a week, and he answers one of them at length in public. The answers have covered grief, God, drugs, ageing, other people's marriages and his own. Faith, Hope and Carnage, published by Canongate and Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 20 September 2022, is the book-length version: more than forty hours of conversation with the journalist Seán O'Hagan, recorded over two years from 2020, about faith, heroin, songwriting and the death of his fifteen-year-old son Arthur in 2015. A second son, Jethro, died in 2022 while the book was being finished. He is also a divisive public figure: he played two concerts in Tel Aviv in November 2017, and in December 2018 answered Brian Eno's open letter by describing the cultural boycott of Israel as cowardly and shameful, a position he has restated since.

The closest thing on this page to Palmer's actual method, running in the opposite direction. Both built a direct, unbrokered channel between a musician and the people who listen, and then made the channel itself part of the work rather than a marketing layer around it. Palmer's version is a musician asking; Cave's is a musician answering. Both write about grief in public while it is still happening, both are religious writers in a secular idiom, and both have found that the audience will carry far more weight than the industry assumed. Start with the Red Hand Files archive before the book — it is free, and it is the form at its purest.

— Lisanne

Every book by Nick Cave →

Authors like Nick Cave →

02
The musician's memoir at its best

Patti Smith

American · Just Kids (2010), M Train (2015)

Just Kids is Smith's account of arriving in New York in 1967 with no money and meeting Robert Mapplethorpe, and of the years the two of them spent keeping each other alive and working — the Chelsea Hotel, shoplifted art supplies, jobs in bookshops, a promise that whoever got there first would come back for the other. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010. M Train (2015) is the quieter companion, a book about coffee, dead husbands, television detectives and the small rituals that hold a day together, and Year of the Monkey (2019) follows it. Her prose career has now run longer than her recording career.

The book most readers of The Art of Asking should read next, and the one it is measured against. Both are memoirs of a young artist kept afloat by a scene rather than by an industry, and both are precise about the actual economics of that — who paid the rent, who fed whom, what a piece of art was traded for. Palmer's Cloud Club in Boston is Smith's Chelsea Hotel forty years on. The difference is register: Smith writes it as elegy and lets the reader draw the conclusion, where Palmer writes it as argument and states it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patti Smith →

03
The idea underneath · Predates the genre

Lewis Hyde

American · The Gift (1983), Trickster Makes This World (1998)

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property argues that a work of art is a gift and not a commodity, and that gifts behave by rules commodities do not: they must keep moving, they create obligation and connection where a purchase closes the account, and something in them is destroyed when they are sold. Hyde builds the case out of anthropology — potlatch, kula rings, folk tales about gifts that must be passed on — and then applies it to the working lives of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, asking how an artist survives in a market economy without turning the gift into a product. Published in 1983, it has never been out of print and has spread almost entirely by one reader handing it to another. Trickster Makes This World (1998) does the same for the mythological figure who breaks rules to make new ones, and A Primer for Forgetting (2019) for memory.

This is the argument The Art of Asking is a memoir of, made three decades earlier and from the other end — scholarship rather than autobiography, and considerably harder to wave away. Hyde supplies exactly what critics said Palmer's book lacked: a worked account of why a gift economy binds people together, what it costs the giver, and where it collides with rent. Read the two together and Palmer's crowdfunding stops looking like a personality trait and starts looking like an old form of exchange rediscovered on a new platform. He is the oldest writer on this page and the one whose book will still be read in fifty years.

— Lisanne
04
The documented connection

Brené Brown

American · Daring Greatly (2012), Atlas of the Heart (2021)

A research professor at the University of Houston who works in grounded theory: she codes large numbers of interviews and builds concepts out of them, on shame, vulnerability, courage and the vocabulary people use for their own emotions. Her 2010 TEDxHouston talk on vulnerability is one of the most-viewed talks ever recorded, and Daring Greatly turned it into the argument that exposure is a source of strength rather than a leak in it. Worth knowing what you are reading: grounded theory generates theory from interviews rather than testing it, so her findings are a different kind of evidence from an experiment, and the books read more confidently than the method alone can carry. In January 2022 she paused her two Spotify-exclusive podcasts over the platform's handling of misinformation on The Joe Rogan Experience, then resumed them the following month, saying she had few options under her contract.

The one connection on this page that is documented rather than inferred: Brown wrote the foreword to The Art of Asking. The two books are the same claim approached from opposite directions — Brown arrives at vulnerability by coding thousands of interviews, Palmer by standing on a crate in a wedding dress handing flowers to strangers for eight years. Read Brown for the taxonomy and Palmer for the fieldwork. If the foreword was the part of The Art of Asking you underlined, this is where it comes from.

— Lisanne

Every book by Brené Brown →

Authors like Brené Brown →

05
The productive disagreement

Astra Taylor

Canadian-American · The People's Platform (2014), The Age of Insecurity (2023)

Taylor is a documentary maker and organiser — Examined Life (2008), What Is Democracy? (2018) — and a co-founder of the Debt Collective, which grew out of a project that bought and cancelled distressed consumer debt. The People's Platform, published by Metropolitan Books in April 2014 and later given an American Book Award, argues that the open internet did not democratise culture: it amplified the inequalities already there, concentrated the money in a handful of platforms, and shifted the cost of making things onto artists themselves under the flattering language of freedom and passion. She delivered the CBC Massey Lectures in 2023, published as The Age of Insecurity.

The designated dissenter, and the argument is structural rather than personal. Taylor's case is that a model in which artists are told to be their own marketing department, their own fundraiser and their own emotional labourer is not liberation but a cost transfer, and that it rewards whoever already had an audience, a network and a safety net. That is the same objection Annalisa Quinn made about The Art of Asking in NPR in 2014, worked out at book length. To be precise about the limit: the book is an argument about the structure of platforms, not a response to Palmer. Read it directly after and the two make an unusually clean pair.

— Lisanne
06
The arithmetic, shown

David Byrne

Scottish-born American · How Music Works (2012)

Byrne's book is part memoir of Talking Heads and CBGB and part argument that music is shaped by the room it was written for — that Gregorian chant, Cuban dance music and CBGB rock all sound the way they do because of the acoustics they were built to fill. Its most useful chapter is the least literary one: he lays out six different ways of releasing a record, from a major-label deal to self-distribution, with real budgets and real percentages, including the numbers from his own albums, and shows how much of a record's income actually reaches the person who made it. On 2 September 2020 he apologised for having worn blackface in a 1984 promotional video connected to Stop Making Sense, calling it a major mistake.

The companion volume that does the sums. Palmer's book argues from feeling that the direct relationship pays better than the industry does; Byrne prints the spreadsheet that shows under what conditions that is true and under what conditions it is not. He is also, like her, a musician who writes prose as a primary activity rather than a sideline. If you finished The Art of Asking convinced but wanting to know what the model looks like in numbers, this is the book that answers it.

— Lisanne
07
Patronage before Patreon

Kristin Hersh

American · Rat Girl (2010), The Future of Songwriting (2024)

Hersh founded Throwing Muses as a teenager in Rhode Island and has run the band, the trio 50FootWave and a solo career for four decades. Rat Girl, published by Penguin in 2010 and in Britain as Paradoxical Undressing, is built from the diary of her eighteenth year: a record deal, a pregnancy and a bipolar diagnosis arriving at roughly the same time, told in the present tense with no hindsight applied. Don't Suck, Don't Die (University of Texas Press, 2015) is an address to her dead friend Vic Chesnutt, Seeing Sideways (2021) is about music and motherhood, and The Future of Songwriting (Melville House, 2024) is her account of what making songs is for now. In 2007 she left the label system and went listener-funded through a subscription scheme called Strange Angels, and co-founded the non-profit CASH Music with Donita Sparks the same year.

The precedent, and the reason to be careful with the word “pioneer”. Hersh was running a paid subscription between a musician and her listeners in 2007, five years before Palmer's Kickstarter and eight before her Patreon, and she built the software and gave it away rather than writing a manifesto about it. The memoirs sit close together too: both are musicians' books about the body, mental health and money, written without the redemption arc the form usually demands. Hersh is the quieter, stranger writer of the two, and Rat Girl is the better sentence-by-sentence book.

— Lisanne
08
The British counterpart

Tracey Thorn

British · Bedsit Disco Queen (2013), Naked at the Albert Hall (2015)

Thorn released a record with the post-punk Marine Girls while still at school, then spent three decades in Everything But the Girl with Ben Watt, a career that moved through indie, orchestral pop and, when a remix of “Missing” became a worldwide hit in 1995, dance music. Bedsit Disco Queen, published by Virago in 2013, is her account of all of it, including the parts a rock memoir usually skips: contracts, sales figures, an illness, and her decision to stop touring altogether. Naked at the Albert Hall (2015) is a book about the singing voice, Another Planet (2019) about suburbia, and My Rock 'n' Roll Friend (2021) about Lindy Morrison of the Go-Betweens and about which women get written into rock history and which get written out. Everything But the Girl returned in 2023 with Fuse, twenty-four years after their previous album.

The same job done one country and one generation over, and done drily. Both write about being a woman in a music business that has an opinion about how women should look and sound, both are frank about the accounting, and both left the standard career track and made their own arrangement with an audience. Where Palmer is a performer on the page as well as the stage, Thorn is the analyst: sceptical, funny, and consistently interested in why the industry does what it does rather than in how it felt. If you want the argument without the volume, start here.

— Lisanne
09
The other talk that became a book

Elizabeth Gilbert

American · Big Magic (2015), All the Way to the River (2025)

Gilbert wrote Eat Pray Love (2006), which sold in numbers that changed what a memoir could be, and Big Magic (Riverhead, 2015), which grew out of her 2009 TED talk about treating creative inspiration as something that arrives from outside rather than something you must be tortured to produce. Its argument is that fear is allowed in the car but never at the wheel, and that ideas go looking for collaborators. In June 2023 she withdrew her finished novel The Snow Forest, set in twentieth-century Russia, after Ukrainian readers objected to its setting; commentators divided sharply over whether that was a decent response or a bad precedent. Her most recent book, All the Way to the River (2025), is a memoir of her relationship with Rayya Elias and of her own addiction.

The structural twin: a hugely successful woman gives a TED talk about how making things actually works, then expands it into a book that becomes a permission slip for readers who wanted one. Both books argue that the creative act is relational rather than solitary — Gilbert's ideas arrive from outside the writer, Palmer's resources arrive from outside the artist — and both have been criticised on the same ground, that the advice assumes a reader who already has room to manoeuvre. Gilbert is the gentler of the two and the better place to start if The Art of Asking was too raw.

— Lisanne
Every book by Elizabeth Gilbert →

Authors like Elizabeth Gilbert →

10
The living recommendation

Michelle Zauner

American · Crying in H Mart (2021)

Zauner records as Japanese Breakfast and published Crying in H Mart with Knopf in April 2021, expanded from a 2018 New Yorker essay. It is about her mother's death from cancer, about being the Korean-American daughter of a Korean mother in Oregon, and about Korean food as the last working line between them; it stayed on the bestseller lists for years. The album Jubilee arrived the same year and For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) in March 2025. A film adaptation was set up with Will Sharpe directing and Zauner writing; she said in February 2025 that it was on pause. She has spent much of the time since living in Seoul and working on a second book.

The musician's memoir currently doing what Palmer's did in 2014: outselling the records, reaching people who have never heard the band, and being handed between readers. The structural rhyme is exact. Both braid a career in music together with the slow death of the person the author loved most — Zauner's mother, Palmer's oldest friend Anthony Martignetti — and both refuse to let the career be the point. Zauner is the more controlled writer and the less argumentative one; there is no thesis here, only the thing itself.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Amanda Palmer

If you want the closest match in method, read Nick Cave.

The Red Hand Files, free since September 2018, then Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022).

If you want the musician's memoir at its best, read Patti Smith.

Just Kids. Two broke artists in New York keeping each other alive and working.

If you want the idea underneath the book, read Lewis Hyde.

The Gift (1983). The gift economy argued properly, thirty-one years earlier.

If you want the argument against, read Astra Taylor.

The People's Platform. Who can actually afford to ask, and who pays for the asking.

If you want the precedent nobody credits, read Kristin Hersh.

Rat Girl. She was running a listener-funded subscription in 2007.

If you want more memoirs

My shelf of memoirs has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Amanda Palmer

Who should I read if I love Amanda Palmer?

Nick Cave is the closest on method — the Red Hand Files is the same direct channel between a musician and an audience, run in reverse, and Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022) is the book-length version. Patti Smith's Just Kids is the musician's memoir most readers of The Art of Asking go to next. Lewis Hyde's The Gift (1983) is the idea underneath the whole book, argued rather than narrated. Brené Brown wrote the foreword to The Art of Asking and is the obvious next step if vulnerability was the part that landed. Astra Taylor is the strongest disagreement, and among musicians still publishing, Kristin Hersh, Tracey Thorn and Michelle Zauner.

What is The Art of Asking actually about?

Two things at once. It is a memoir of the years before Palmer had any money: eight years as a living statue in Harvard Square, painted white and standing on a milk crate handing flowers to whoever put a dollar in the hat, work as a stripper, the Dresden Dolls playing to rooms nobody would sign, and the illness of her oldest friend and mentor Anthony Martignetti. And it is an argument, drawn from all that, that asking for help is a skill rather than a humiliation, that the money follows the relationship rather than the other way round, and that the problem with artists and payment is not enforcement but permission. Grand Central published it on 11 November 2014 with a foreword by Brené Brown, and it grew out of her TED talk of February 2013.

Is The Art of Asking worth reading, or is the criticism fair?

Both, and the criticism is worth reading alongside it. The book was a New York Times bestseller and it is genuinely good on the texture of a working artist's life before success. The most serious objection was made by Annalisa Quinn reviewing it for NPR on 20 November 2014: that in our society certain kinds of people are allowed to ask for things and certain kinds are not, that who gets heard when they ask is the question the book never puts, and that Palmer's own crowd was unusually able to pay. The Boston Globe called it a study in contradictions. None of that is a reason to skip it; it is a reason to read Astra Taylor's The People's Platform next, which makes the same case at book length.

What happened between Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman?

Palmer married the author Neil Gaiman in January 2011 and they announced their separation in November 2022; they have a son born in 2015. In July 2024 Tortoise Media published a podcast series, Master, in which women accused Gaiman of sexual assault. On 13 January 2025 New York magazine published a long investigation by Lila Shapiro, “There Is No Safe Word”, based on interviews with several more women. Gaiman denied the allegations in a statement on his own site on 14 January 2025, writing that he had never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Palmer posted on Instagram on 15 January 2025 that she could not comment publicly because of ongoing custody and divorce proceedings, and said through a representative that she was profoundly disturbed by the allegations. Some of the reporting also raised questions about what Palmer knew, which she has denied. In March 2025 the Brooklyn venue National Sawdust cancelled a performance of hers; she has continued to tour since. No criminal charges have been brought against either of them.

Was Amanda Palmer sued, and what happened to the case?

Yes, and it has been dismissed on procedural grounds, with an appeal still running. On 3 February 2025 Scarlett Pavlovich, who had worked as a nanny for the couple in New Zealand, filed civil suits: against Gaiman in federal court in Wisconsin, and against Palmer in federal courts in Massachusetts and New York because it was unclear where Palmer was living. The claims against Palmer were brought under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, together with negligence, and sought more than $7 million. Palmer denied the allegations publicly and in court. On 6 February 2026 the Massachusetts case against her was dismissed on the doctrine of forum non conveniens — a ruling that New Zealand, where the events are said to have happened, is the proper place to bring the claims. That is a decision about where a case belongs, not about whether it is true. Pavlovich appealed; the appeal was docketed in the First Circuit on 13 February 2026 as Pavlovich v. Palmer, No. 26-1151, briefing was completed in August 2026, and it is pending. The parallel case against Gaiman was dismissed on the same ground and the Seventh Circuit affirmed that on 29 June 2026. No court has ruled on the substance of any of these allegations.

Are Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman divorced?

They announced their separation in a joint statement in November 2022, and Palmer described it in an interview in April 2023 as a slow and painful divorce season. In January 2025 she said publicly that custody and divorce proceedings were still ongoing, and press reports as late as February 2026 still described Gaiman as her estranged husband. A number of celebrity-news sites state that the divorce was finalised in 2022; that cannot be right, given her own statements afterwards, and no dated confirmation of a final decree has been published. The accurate answer is that the marriage ended in November 2022, the legal process has run since then, and its current status is not on the public record.

Has Amanda Palmer written another book?

Not yet. The Art of Asking (2014) is her only prose book. Before it she published three books tied to her music: The Dresden Dolls Companion (2006), The Dresden Dolls: The Virginia Companion (2008) with Brian Viglione, and Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Collection of Photographic Evidence (2009), with photographs by Kyle Cassidy and short texts by Neil Gaiman, plus the illustrated Evelyn Evelyn (2011) with Jason Webley. She confirmed in July 2026 that she is writing a new book, but no title, publisher or date has been announced.

What is Amanda Palmer doing now, in 2026?

Working, and mostly with the Dresden Dolls. The band regained the right to re-record their catalogue and released Yes, Virginia…(Tailor's Version) on 7 August 2026, a full re-recording of their 2006 album with guest vocals from Veronica Swift and Jinkx Monsoon, and toured Europe between 1 and 11 September 2026 — Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Utrecht, Paris, Manchester and London, their first European run in twenty years. On 9 July 2026 she released a video for “Death Thing”, shot in one take with the dancer Coco Karol, in which hundreds of objects mailed in by her roughly 25,000 Patreon members were burned on a bonfire. She has also said she is writing a book and developing a stage production built around the songs she wrote after two years stranded in New Zealand during the pandemic, which produced the EP New Zealand Survival Songs in January 2024.

Is there a book that argues against The Art of Asking?

Two, from different directions. Astra Taylor's The People's Platform (2014) is the closer of the pair: it argues that the open internet did not free artists but transferred costs onto them, that being your own fundraiser and marketer is unpaid work rather than independence, and that the model rewards whoever already had an audience. Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future? (2013) makes the technological version of the case — that an economy in which culture is free and artists are tipped will not sustain a middle class of creators, and that small automatic payments, not voluntary generosity, are the fix. Neither is written about Palmer. Both are arguments about the system her book celebrates.

What was the Amanda Palmer Kickstarter controversy?

In 2012, after raising $1,192,793 from 24,883 backers, Palmer invited local musicians to join her on stage on the tour in exchange for beer, hugs, merchandise and the experience rather than a fee. The reaction from working musicians and from the music press was severe, on the grounds that an artist who had just raised more than a million dollars asking others to play for free was the exact opposite of the argument she was making. She reversed the decision in September 2012 and paid them. She writes about the episode in The Art of Asking, and it is the clearest test case of the book's central question: the difference between asking and taking is consent, and the difference between asking and exploiting is whether the person asked could reasonably say no.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ‘How do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking, ‘How do we let people pay for music?’”

— Amanda Palmer, “The Art of Asking”, TED2013, February 2013.

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