I've read 100+ marketing books and only these 9 are worth your time 📖

My all-time favorite reads

Dec 11, 2025

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My all-time favorite marketing books 📖

Last week I showed you how to actually read more books.

This week, I’m sharing which books are worth your time. These books made me better at my job and changed how I think about marketing.

Here’s my shelf of recommended books. ↓

(Fair warning: they’re highly addictive)

P.S. I’m giving away 5 bundles of ALL these books (over $1,000 value) to readers of this newsletter. Scroll to the bottom to find out how to win them all for free 🎁

1. This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

I’ll be honest - I used to roll my eyes at Seth Godin. His writing felt too abstract & too philosophical.

This book is different.

The core idea changed how I think about marketing: stop trying to reach everyone. Find the smallest group of people who genuinely need what you’re offering and serve them really, really well.

He calls it “the smallest viable audience”.

The book walks you through how to find that audience, understand what they need, and build trust over time (e.g. with status games).

If you’ve bounced off Seth Godin before - give this one a shot!

2. Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz

Start with your main point. Use short paragraphs. Cut every word that doesn’t need to be there. Write so clearly that someone skimming for 30 seconds still gets the gist.

If you write anything for work - emails, posts, reports - it’s worth your time.

This article is skimmable because of what I learned from this book.

It’s now my writing bible.

3. Building a StoryBrand 2.0 by Donald Miller

Your customer is the hero, not you. You’re the guide who helps them win.

That’s it. That’s the whole book.

But he breaks it into 7 steps that actually work: identify what your customer wants, name their problem, position yourself as the guide, give them a plan, call them to action, show them what failure looks like, show them what success looks like.

The 2.0 version has more examples and a section on campaigns. There’s an AI tool bundled with it that I’ve never used - the framework itself is what matters.

4. Influence by Robert Cialdini

This is the bible of marketing psychology.

Cialdini breaks down 6 psychological principles that make people say yes:

🔄 Reciprocity - we feel obligated to give back when someone gives to us first
✅ Commitment - once we take a small step, we want to stay consistent
👥 Social proof - we look at what others are doing to decide what we should do
🎓 Authority - we trust people with credentials
💛 Liking - we’re more likely to say yes to people we like
⏰ Scarcity - limited availability makes us act faster

It’s dense - lots of studies and examples. But that’s what I liked about it.

5. Magic Words by Jonah Berger

Jonah Berger is a Wharton professor who studies why things spread.

My favorite insight from the book: adding “er” to words turns actions into identities. For example - Don’t ask someone to “help”. Ask them to be a “helper”. Don’t tell people to “vote”. Tell them to be a “voter”.

People do what you ask them when they see it as part of who they are. I wrote an entire article about this “2 letters that make people click“.

The rest of the book is full of small language tweaks for emails, ads, etc. His other book “Contagious” is also great if you want to understand virality.

6. Loved by Martina Lauchengco

I never understood product marketing until I read this book.

Like, I knew it existed. I worked with PMMs.

But what they actually did all day? Couldn’t tell you.

Martina breaks it down in a way that finally made sense to me. She’s done product marketing at Microsoft and a bunch of startups, and this reads like she’s handing you her personal notes.

The book covers how to position a product no one understands yet, how to evolve your messaging as you grow, and how to tell if any of it is landing.

7. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg

Weinberg built DuckDuckGo. He wrote this book to answer a simple question: which marketing channel should you actually focus on?

The book covers 19 channels (SEO, content, PR, ads, partnerships, etc) and gives you a framework called “Bullseye” to test them:

Pick 3 channels that might work
Run small, cheap experiments
See what actually gets results
Double down on the winner

Each chapter covers one channel with examples, rough budgets, and common mistakes. Super practical.

8. Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

Thompson reverse-engineered viral things and discovered almost nothing “goes viral” the way we think. Posts don’t spread person-to-person like a virus.

In reality, one huge account shares the thing and boom. It’s viral.

What we call “viral” is actually just “broadcast”.

Your post doesn’t go from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 100,000 shares. It goes from 10 to MrBeast shares it to 100,000. That’s it.

Quality matters but access to the right people with big audiences matters wayyyyyy more.

9. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

This book is 85 years old and still one of the best things you can read about connecting with people.

The core idea: people don’t really care about you. They care about themselves.

Carnegie’s advice: stop talking about yourself. Ask about them. Remember their name. Listen more than you talk. Make people feel important.

In marketing terms: stop making your landing page about how great your company is. Make it about what your customer will achieve. Stop writing emails about features. Write about problems.

Simple stuff. But most of us (myself included) forget it all the time.