About Us
Unicorn Librarian Press is a tiny but mighty publishing imprint devoted to books that are smart, irreverent, and just a little bit magical. Founded by a real-life librarian who believes libraries are sacred, curiosity is powerful, and information should be accessible, honest, and occasionally hilarious.
Our Books
Make Me: the anti-bullying pocket guide for adults who are done putting up with nonsense.
What if the most powerful boundary in the world was only two words?
Make me.
This pocket-sized guide explores the surprisingly effective art of calm resistance. When bullies, blowhards, and petty tyrants expect automatic compliance, those two words have a funny way of changing the conversation.
Inside you'll find:
- The psychology of why bullies hate resistance
- The subtle art of delivering “make me” with perfect timing
- Real-world scenarios where a calm refusal saves your sanity
- Suspiciously academic references supporting the whole idea
But Make Me is also something else.
Part satire and part social experiment, the book asks a bigger question:
what does it mean to write a book in the age of artificial intelligence?
Co-authored by a real-life librarian and a very confident algorithm named Chad G. Deepee, Make Me blends humor, cultural commentary, and strategic boundary-setting into one tiny, mischievous guide.
Because adulthood should not require unlimited patience.
Available as ebook, trade paperback, pocket sized hardcover and audiobook on Amazon.
More Stuff You Don't Need (but want)
Nope Mug
Nope Corduroy Baseball Hat
Nope Baseball Cap
Enjoy a hot beverage in your 12oz. Nope mug
Nope Corduroy Baseball Hat
Nope Corduroy Baseball Hat
Nope Corduroy Baseball Hat
Cozy new Nope hat
Press Room
Nope. Make Me. How a librarian argued with an AI, put a three-legged cat in a book, and accidentally
Jane McLean had wanted to do the experiment for a while.
She's a librarian. She understood publishing from the inside of a library: acquisitions, cataloging, the quiet authority of a Midwest invoice. What she didn't understand was Amazon. Specifically: why it was filling up with so much low-quality self-published work, and whether the people publishing it were actually making any money. Because if they were, that was one story. And if they weren't, that was a completely different and more interesting story.
She decided the only honest way to find out was to go through it herself. With real money, real stakes, and a real product at the end. Not to learn how to self-publish. Not just to help others do it, but to understand what was actually happening inside the machine.
She told her husband that they would likely lose money. He said go for it.
There was just one problem. The experiment required a book, and writing a book was the part she had no particular interest in. That wasn't the experiment. The experiment was everything around it; the imprint, the ISBN, the algorithm, the distribution, the margins, the economics. The book was just the object she needed to put through the machine.
Without AI and John Oliver, she would have stopped right there. The experiment would have stayed an intention, filed somewhere between good ideas and things she never got around to.
She was stuck coming up with a book topic.
Then she watched John Oliver.
The Inspiration
His segment was about resistance. About the particular moment we're in, when institutions and individuals face pressure to simply go along, to comply, to avoid the confrontation. Oliver was making the case, with his usual combination of outrage and absurdity, for pushing back. For the power of just saying no. For refusing to roll over.
Something clicked. But not in the way ideas usually click. This was more like recognition.
She had never quite put a name to it. Then Oliver made his case, and she had one.
She also, somewhere in the same moment, noticed the particular genre of book that had been quietly colonizing the self-help shelves. Two words. Big font. Entire philosophy contained in a noun and a verb, or sometimes just two words that had no business being placed next to each other but somehow promised to change your life.
Let Them. Lean In. Dare Greatly. Brave Enough. Big Magic.
And somewhere between Oliver making his case for backbone and McLean recognizing herself in it, a phrase landed.
Make me.
Two words. Absolutely perfect as a response to every bully, blowhard, and petty tyrant who had ever demanded something they had no right to demand. Deadpan. Defiant. Funny.
And, she realized, it wasn't just a title. It was her. It had always been her. Oliver's segment hadn't given her an idea. It had held up a mirror to a philosophy she could get behind.
She had her book. Now she needed to write the thing.
The Co-Author She Used, Abused, Fought With, and Credited
This is where AI comes in. Not as a villain. Not as a shortcut. As a collaborator she treated the way most people treat collaborators: with gratitude, frustration, occasional contempt, and ultimately a shared byline.
Without it, the experiment would never have happened. McLean is clear about this. Writing a book was not the part she was interested in, and the blank page would have stayed blank. AI gave her a way through. She used it, pushed it, rejected whole drafts, argued with its suggestions, rewrote its sentences, and pulled it back when it went somewhere she didn't want to go. The final work is hers. The assist was real.
What bothered her was not that AI was being used to write books. It was that nobody was saying so. The publishing industry was quietly absorbing AI-assisted work without updating its language, its metadata, its copyright frameworks, or its general pretense that books still emerge from solitary humans in quiet rooms.
McLean is a librarian. Accurate description of things is more or less her entire profession. The silence was professionally irritating.
She decided to be loud about it in the specific way a librarian is loud: by putting the question directly into the cataloging system and seeing what happened.
His name is Chad G. Deepee. Say it out loud. Take a moment.
The name was not an accident. McLean wanted to put the AI authorship question onto a book cover, submit it to the Library of Congress, list it on Amazon, and see what anyone did about it.
What they did was nothing. The Library of Congress issued a control number. Amazon processed the listing. The copyright forms not designed for the question "is your co-author a person" got filed anyway.
The copyright page addresses all of this with more candor than you typically find in copyright pages. It describes Chad as "a non-person," acknowledges the work was built on "billions of words written by humans, including novelists, journalists, poets, academics, and at least one person having a meltdown on Reddit in 2019," and notes that "Chad G. Deepee would like you to know he takes full credit for the em dashes."
The About the Authors section adds that Chad "specializes in producing 92% correct information at remarkable speed," has "never been bullied, paid rent, or worried about the long-term implications of automation," and "currently resides on distributed servers and consumes vast amounts of water."
Jane, by contrast, is a librarian and union member who has "spent years teaching people how to evaluate information, question authority, and read the fine print."
They compromise. It says so right there in the book. That part, at least, is accurate.
The Book Itself
Make Me: The Anti-Bullying Pocket Guide for Adults Who Are Done Putting Up With Nonsense is exactly what it sounds like, and also a gentle skewering of every book that sounds like it.
There's a chapter on delivery: deadpan recommended, coffee optional, witnesses preferred. One on consequences. One called "The Gospel of Resistance." A bibliography that cites the Journal of Unexamined Power, the Journal of Passive-Aggressive Communication, and a boundary-setting manual from North Pole Press.
None of those journals exist. All of them are completely believable. Somewhere in that gap is the question the whole project was quietly asking.
The book also contains illustrations of a cat.
About the Cat
This is where things get personal, though perhaps they already were.
The cat has three legs. The cat is a Siberian. The cat's name is not being disclosed because the cat has not agreed to publicity and McLean is firm about this in a way that suggests the cat has made its preferences known through the usual channels.
What the cat agreed to, apparently, is being illustrated. Multiple times. Throughout the book. Serving as a kind of spiritual mascot for the whole "zero tolerance for nonsense" philosophy the book espouses. Which tracks. If McLean had been living this philosophy her whole life without naming it, cats had been living it longer and with considerably less ambiguity.
McLean's youngest daughter served as editor. Her primary editorial note, recorded in the acknowledgements, was that the cat drawings contained anatomical errors. Cats, she pointed out, deserve anatomical integrity. The drawings were revised.
The acknowledgements page, quietly the best page in the book, also thanks McLean's oldest daughter for asking how her mother could ethically use AI without paying an artist. "Proud moment, honestly," McLean writes. Her husband gets credit for keeping everyone fed while she "disappeared into this project like it was a second job I wasn't getting paid for." Her siblings for bearing the brunt of her "make me" philosophy "starting at a very young age." Her workplace for "the daily boot camp in survival skills."
The cat gets the last line.
Three legs. Zero tolerance for nonsense. A muse, a mentor, a fierce, fluffy enforcer of boundaries.
The Publishing Company She Invented
Once she had a book, she needed a publisher. So she invented one.
Unicorn Librarian Press. Pocket Guide Series. A logo. Typography chosen to suggest institutional credibility. She bought her own ISBNs from Bowker rather than taking Amazon's free ones, which would have permanently tied her imprint to Amazon's identity. She filed everything properly. Designed a full cover wrap to KDP's precise specifications.
Her underlying question was simple: could a self-published book pass for traditionally published? Could she close the gap that usually gives these things away?
Then she asked herself the more uncomfortable professional question: would she buy this for her library?
No. No trade reviews. No distribution footprint. By her own acquisitions standards, the book doesn't exist. She found this useful to know.
What Amazon Taught Her
The algorithm rewards books that are already selling. To sell, you need to be found. To be found, you need to already be selling.
This is not a puzzle with a solution. It's just the situation.
You get seven keyword slots. You optimize your metadata. You pick your BISAC category carefully. You watch your launch-week velocity determine whether anyone who wasn't already looking for you ever finds you at all.
As for whether the people flooding Amazon with low-quality self-published books were actually making money, the answer, as best she can tell, is: a few are, most aren't, and the ones who are have usually already built an audience somewhere else entirely. Amazon didn't make them. They brought themselves to Amazon.
The books aren't there because they're profitable. They're there because publishing them costs almost nothing and hope is free.
The Tote Bag
There is an Etsy shop. Printify handles fulfillment. The passive income is more active than the phrase implies and the margins are thinner than the tutorials suggest.
But the tote bag with the cat on it exists. It is, by all accounts, excellent.
Sales figures are private.
The Financial Spreadsheet
Not good. Was never going to be good. McLean told her husband before she started. He said go for it. They proceeded.
What she bought with the money she lost: she understands now, from inside the machine, what the economics of self-publishing actually look like, and why Amazon is full of books that probably shouldn't exist but cost nothing to put there. She knows what it feels like to use AI not as a magic button but as a difficult, occasionally maddening, genuinely useful tool that made something possible that otherwise wouldn't have been. She has opinions about AI authorship that are grounded in experience rather than theory. She's happy to share them.
She built an imprint. A second book is coming soon — I Would If I Could, But I Can't, So I Won't — which is either a promise or a threat depending on how the spreadsheet looks that day.
Chad G. Deepee is standing by. He has thoughts. They will require lots of revising.
The cat remains unavailable for comment, and has been from the start.
Jane McLean is a librarian and the founder of Unicorn Librarian Press. Make Me is available on Amazon. The cat is not.
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Unicorn Librarian Press
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