
What business books look like today, or maybe more accurately what books people read to help in them in business, differs greatly from ten or twenty years ago.īut in digging into the winners and losers in the larger group, I started to notice that books classified as self-help were recovering more strongly than business titles. I have a long standing theory that the two categories are starting to look more and more like each other and that the decision a publisher makes to classify a book in one group or the other may not reflect in what part of their life the reader is helped. In my market reports, I have been discussing business and self-help as a singular category. The return of business books reflects the same resilience that has been seen in the book publishing market throughout the COVID-19 period. This is good news for this corner of the world. You can see in the chart below that those increases have been significant and we are starting to return to pre-COVID-19 sales levels in business and self-help.

There had been four weeks with sales down almost 50% and the trend continued into the following week.īut then a funny thing happened-sales increased.Īnd the same thing happened the following week. I wrote my last report on April 6th and at that point, we were starting to settle into a new normal of depressed sales in business and self-help.

Quick note: If you’d like more updates with trends and case studies from business book publishing, you can subscribe by clicking through to the newsletter sign-up form.Īnd if you missed it, please check out my post from March 22nd and follow-up post on April 6th on the shift in the business book market.
