There is a lot of discussion in publishing about how books, in the era of Kindle and other ebook readers, will get smaller. They are even talking about the concept of the micro-novel to meet the demand of the reader for shorter books. In NLP when the only option was printed books there was a tendency towards general NLP books or several elements in one. Now with ebooks and indeed print on demand we see very specific books – and they are very popular.

Our first such book on a very specific area was Stop Bedwetting in 7 Days which as the title suggests tackles one very specific subject. In 2010 a master practitioner with expertise with children, Judy Bartkowiak, brought us NLP for Parents and NLP for Children and since then has added four more specialist NLP books.

As a publisher this new phenomenon is excellent as it means we can rapidly expand our author stable, in areas in which the authors have specific knowledge. It doesn’t mean that the paperback has stopped being appealing – in fact, we find a lot of practitioners have the eBook version themselves and then leave the people they are coaching with a copy of the paperback.

Although Kindle has the volume we see increased use of both Kobo Books and iBooks for iPad. Kobo are interesting as they seem to have extended geographical reach with NLP books of ours selling into Singapore, India, Australia and many other countries.

It also enables the publisher to take on very specialised books safe in the knowledge that these new formats ensure the book is widely available – take our latest book coming out in a few weeks time is ‘No More Bingo Dresses – How to use NLP to cope with breast cancer and other people – it’s a very specialist book to help people cope with the trauma of cancer.

So for NLP, publishers and ultimately NLP practitioners the evolution of eBooks is a good thing. Watch out for many more specialist titles in NLP.