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World Mental Health Day: Turning pages for self-help, to beat Covid blues
Self-help books are witnessing a constant rise in demand from readers, as they focus on upping their morale and mental health via the written word. Book stores and publishers share how the trend that picked up in lockdown continues to stay even in the unlock phase.
New Delhi The daily hassles of WFH since the first lockdown in 2020 made a Delhi-based cybersecurity professional, Naman Gautam, wander away from his usual reads such as thrillers and science picks. “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life came to me as a breath of much-needed fresh air, and made me think about my own Ikigai, or the reason of being. I’ve since then continued to add more books on happiness and mental peace to my to-be-read list,” says Gautam.
Life, during the pandemic, has sure influenced a change in reading habits of many. Milee Aishwarya, publisher at Penguin, shares how self-help, spirituality, and lifestyle became the popular genres during the lockdown and still continue to remain so. “We always had a strong self-help list. However, now is even more important to get the best voices from self-help, and mind, body, spirit to reach out to a larger audience. The pandemic threw up conversations around mental health especially with given the life changing it had for most of us, and we saw much more on the subject from authors and readers alike.”
As everyone veered towards the unlock phase, the sales of books in the genres of self-help and alike continued to remain strong. “Sadhguru’s books Death and Karma have done very well as readers continue to find value in spiritual understanding,” notes Aishwarya, and speaking on the self-help genre boom, Bushra Ahmed, commissioning editor at HarperCollins India adds, “Faced with so much general uncertainty all around, readers tend to reach out for books that comfort them. Self-help books, in that way, tend to be cosy, feel good, and often thought provoking. As commissioning editors, we looked at tapping into trends like wellness, self-care, spirituality, all that come under the umbrella of self-help.”
It’s believed that people got time to research and thus took to writing more on subjects such as mental health, and now in the unlock phase they are coming up with an increased number of titles on the same. “Readers utilised those periods of isolation to upgrade and update themselves,” says Trisha De Niyogi from Niyogi Books, adding that people have also alternated between different genres from time to time. “But now, we are observing a significant attention towards biographies as well as books that are essentially read to enhance knowledge. Demand for food and health centric books such as on meditation and yoga, has also risen. Since people got time to read last year, they even picked up books on highly researched subjects such as in art, architecture, and are now continuing to read those series.”
And even bookstores mirror this reading trend. Aakash Gupta from Crossword Bookstores, informs, “We normally get good numbers in self help and business genres. And in unlock, the titles that have been seeing maximum sales include How To Talk To Anyone, Ikigai, Life’s Amazing Secrets, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Psychology of Money, etc.”
“We have been home delivering books during the lockdown,” says Swagat Sengupta from Oxford Bookstores, adding, “There has been a 9% increase in terms of sales of New Age Books. With unlocking, many of our patrons were going through a spectrum of emotions and we could see that in their book requests. Many others who were working from home during these 1.5 years, wanted to engage themselves and their loves ones into some good reads and so have ordered books ranging from classics to the new popular ones. Books like Ikigai, The Alchemist, The Heartfulness Way, Life’s Amazing Secrets, Homo Deus, etc were really popular besides children’s literature that received a lot of traction.”
Author tweets @siddhijainn
