Workbooks and guided journals are self-help staples. This season, a pair of bestselling authors are extending their brands with new books and products that encourage readers to fill in the blanks.
Gretchen Rubin’s mini empire includes The Happiness Project and other self-help titles, as well as calendars, a podcast, an app, and a newsletter. She’s also published guided journals, first with Potter Style and, since 2021, under her Gretchen Rubin Media brand. A 2024 distribution deal with Cardinal Publishers Group is making her homegrown products more widely available.
The May release of Five-Senses Journal, illustrated by Gretchen Rubin Media creative director Emmanuelle Joyeux and previously available only via Rubin’s website, coincides with the paperback reissue of 2023’s Life in Five Senses (Crown). October sees the release of Don’t Break the Chain, illustrated by Ana Miminoshvili, which works in tandem with the 21 strategies for habit change Rubin introduced in 2015’s Better Than Before (Crown); gold star stickers reward progress while “pass” stickers allow the user to take a day off. Other forthcoming merch includes a 150-prompt creativity card deck and a tin with five productivity-minded sticky notepads.
Cultural critic Roxane Gay is known for myriad projects—the essay collection Bad Feminist, the memoir Hunger, her eponymous imprint at Grove Atlantic, her “Work Friend” advice column at the New York Times. She dipped a toe into the creativity corner of self-help through a collaboration with stationery company Baronfig, which released the Gay-branded Draft Writing Journal in 2022 and a companion pen the following year. With the forthcoming Do the Work (Leaping Hare, June), she extends her foray into the self-help genre.
Coauthored by Megan Pillow, who coedits Gay’s newsletter The Audacity, and illustrated by Aurélia Durand (This Book Is Anti-Racist), the workbook assembles the ideas of thinkers including Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and draws on illustrative examples—redlining, the Stonewall Uprising—to illuminate concepts of power and privilege. The authors examine the intersections of power, race, gender identity, sexuality, and more, posing various prompts—such as “What is your working definition of power?” and “What are your personal sources of power?”—to encourage reflection and action.
