“Self-help had a bad rap in the past,” says Olivia Peitsch, marketing manager at Baker Publishing Group. “But a new generation is coming into the reading space, and self-help is becoming more widely accepted. It isn’t considered gimmicky anymore; it’s bravery.”

Other publishers agree. “More and more readers, especially younger readers, are interested in self-help if it works,” says Publisher Tim McKee at North Atlantic Books, who looks for efficacy based on evidence and for titles with inclusive POVs. “There are self-help tools and lineages that have largely been under considered by readers and publishers in part because they don’t center Western, cis, heterosexual, white bodies. We are publishing books to broaden the concept of what bodies we are helping and whose wisdom is being platformed.”

Publishers also talked about the self-help paradigm broadening from an individualistic to a more intersectional concept of self. “People are suffering more than ever with uncertainty with regard to climate change, world developments, politics; it just goes on and on,” says Margo Beren, sales director at New Harbinger Publications. “Uncertainty is a driver of anxiety.”

As many as half of adults ages 18–24 recently reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to independent health policy organization KFF. “As access to health care is eroded—particularly mental health care for people in marginalized communities—and misinformation runs rampant, we expect that more readers will be coming to self-help out of necessity,” says Bevin Donahue, communications director at North Atlantic Books. “This is a need that we take incredibly seriously.”

Here, publishers share upcoming self-help titles that fill that need among others.

Baker Publishing Group

Michigan-based Baker Publishing Group is a Christian publisher putting out 150 titles a year across six divisions, which include Bethany House, Revell, BakerBooks, Chosen, BakerAcademic, and BrazosPress. “We’ve put more of a focus on self-help in recent years,” says Olivia Peitsch, marketing manager. “Specifically, Revell Nonfiction has tried to make that adaptation to reach more readers.” With this expansion, the house publishes 10–20 self-help titles a year that, Peitsch notes, are for all readers, with or without a faith background.

Two upcoming titles are aimed at helping people find a more fulfilling life. Leadership coach and consultant Tracey Gee wrote The Magic of Knowing What You Want, January 2025, ISBN 9780800746223, to help readers get to the root of their desires about how they spend their time and find out what will give them a greater sense of purpose and belonging. Adapting her coaching framework to book form, Gee uses exercises that can be personalized and questions throughout to guide the reader toward a more fulfilling path. The book, from Baker’s Revell division, will appeal to anyone struggling with purpose or direction in their lives, from recent college graduates to folks going through a midlife crisis to parents who’ve lost themselves in raising children. “People are more aware than they have been in the past of wanting to live a life with meaning instead of just plugging along and working on the life that was handed to them,” Peitsch says.

From BakerBooks, Making Time by Maria Bowler, January 2025, ISBN 9781540904072, is in the same vein, but Peitsch says, “for the fatigued creative.” Bowler coaches and leads workshops for people struggling to live the creative life they desire. Her thoughtful, reflective book helps people let go of the pressure to be productive so they can find deeper meaning and satisfaction in their creative projects. “These people maybe feel fatigued, overworked, or tired of putting something into the world that doesn’t have meaning,” Peitsch says.

There’s a similarity between the two titles, but Peitsch makes a distinction. “Creatives have that more reflective personality,” she says. “They like to sit with stuff, reconcile, and wrestle with things a little bit more. And that’s what Bowler is doing in fighting certain practices that have gotten people into the place where they feel stuck.”

North Atlantic Books

Most of the 35 titles published yearly by California-based North Atlantic Books include self-help elements. “But [they] often expand into other genres or, we hope, ultimately nurture a more holistic wellness beyond the individual self,” says Bevin Donahue, communications director. Those other genres include bodywork and somatics; climate justice; fitness, health, and wellness; grief and dying; Indigenous perspectives; magic praxis; martial arts; psychedelics and plant medicine; racial justice; society and culture; and spirituality.

In Tending the Bones, January 2025, ISBN 9798889841203, Pavini Moray, PhD, a somatic coach specializing in trauma and relationships, guides survivors of sexual trauma through a 13-month healing journey to reclaim pleasure. “This book centers the reality that healing from sexual trauma is often intergenerational work,” Donahue says. “Vin’s [Pavini’s] approach is broad, embodied, and holistic while offering practical skills and resilience tools that resource readers as they approach the work in this book.” The reader will come away with body-based practices, ancestral connection rituals, and reflective empowerment exercises.

Wendy Elisheva Somerson is a somatic practitioner, cofounder of the Seattle chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, and author of An Anti-Zionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing, May 2025, ISBN 9798889841876. Besides offering body-based tools and faith-based practices for processing the intergenerational trauma held in Jewish bodies, Somerson’s asks Jewish readers to embrace a Judaism beyond Zionism. “The book leaves room for nuance, feeling, and reflection,” says Shayna Keyles, associate director of acquisitions.

Drawing on professional experience as a psychologist and lived experience as a disabled woman, Jen Caspari, PhD, wrote You Are More Than Your Body, June 2025, ISBN 9798889842378, to be a resource of evidence-based coping skills for disabled readers. More than 30 exercises and reflection activities, from cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and mindfulness practices, help readers tune into internal experience, shift mental focus, cultivate self-compassion, change their relationship with their thoughts, practice realistic goal setting, and more. “Drawing on her experience, Caspari is able to speak to shame, loneliness, lack of self-confidence, and discomfort in a warm and approachable tone,” says Keyles.
 

Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira August 2025, ISBN 9798889842507, builds on the author’s 2021 title, Hospicing Modernity(North Atlantic) to help readers reckon with the imminent threats of our time. “Outgrowing Modernitychallenges and expands the traditional self-help model,” says Julia Sadowski, associate publicity director. “Oliveira asks each of us to hold space for uncomfortable and overwhelming feelings and invites us to grow up and show up in the face of climate chaos, political instability, and economic inequity.” As a professor of race, inequalities, and global change at the University of British Columbia, Oliveira invites readers to move away from ingrained worldviews to develop the survival-promoting capacities of sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.

A collection of essays, In the Absence of the Ordinary by Francis Weller, August 2025, ISBN 9798889842613, explores grief through the lens of climate catastrophe, collective trauma, unprecedented loneliness, and more concerns of our moment. “As more people continue to be harmed by systemic racism, climate catastrophe, and exploitative capitalism, readers are demanding wisdom, solutions, and practices that recognize the failings of modernity and go beyond the status quo,” Sadowski says. As a psychotherapist, Weller has been leading grief rituals since the 1990s. His book offers practical exercises and reflective prompts throughout to support readers in processing their grief.

New Harbinger Publications

With the mission of reducing human suffering, New Harbinger Publications specializes in self-help books, releasing 65–70 nonfiction titles a year. “With self-help, not everything resonates with us the same as it would with someone else,” says Margo Beren, sales director. “We continue to look at new modalities that are proving effective for the same issues we deal with all the time.”

For example, intuitive eating isn’t a new concept, but applying it to diabetes management is. Intuitive Eating for Diabetes by Janice Dada, MPH, RDN, April 2025, ISBN 9781648484094, posits that weight loss, the most prescribed treatment for diabetes patients, often backfires. Instead, Dada recommends the 10 principles of this anti-diet approach to manage blood sugar and make one’s relationship with food more nourishing. “Intuitive eating wants you to be clear about when and what your body is asking for,” Beren says. “If you’re doing the somatic work of listening to your body, when you’re eating sugar or anything else, when it says, ‘I’m done,’ you’ll hear it.”

The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys by Rahim Thawer, MSW, June 2025, ISBN 9781648485039, addresses the impact on body and mind of homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and rejection that queer and trans men face. Using a cognitive behavioral therapy approach, the book helps GBTQ men heal, cope, and thrive as their authentic selves. “Readers will learn basic skills for cognitive restructuring of unhelpful thought patterns,” Beren says.Each chapter includes case studies, psychoeducation, awareness exercises, thought records, deeper digging, and an “empty chair exercise,” where one talks to a part of oneself or someone else in their life whom they imagine to be sitting in the chair.

Written by psychologist Betsy Holmberg, PhD, Unkind Mind, June 2025, ISBN 9781648484711, is a deep dive into the peer-reviewed neuroscience research on thinking to explain why women are so hard on themselves. This book illuminates how the default mode network, an evolutionary survival mechanism in the brain, is responsible for the inner critic many women live with that tells them they aren’t good enough, smart enough, or worthy of success or love. “Readers will learn to catch the default mode network in the act and ignore it, using mindfulness and active listening to keep their central executive network, where the consciousness is, turned on and active,” Beren says.

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