Editor's Letter #15: 8 game-changing books to celebrate 8 years of the Shelf Help Club
Happy birthday to us! 8 VIBs for 8 years (and a self-discovery workshop gift for you)
Hello everybody,
This week I’m celebrating eight years of the Shelf Help Club (SHC).
That’s eight years since I held the very first SHC meetup in a wine bar in Chiswick as a way to start sharing the magic of self-help.
I also needed to find some new friends/lovers of self-discovery before my other non self-help loving friends stopped talking to me/clubbed me to death with a copy of Feel the Fear.
I did get quite obsessed.
And I’m not sorry.
Because self-help changed my life and I wanted/want everyone to know that it can do the same for them. For you!
(And if you want to know more about why I became such a self-help evangelist, you can read more about my story in past EDITOR’S LETTERS and/or the ABOUT US page on the SHC website).
Eight years on from that meetup, and promoting, sharing and supporting self-help in community has become my passion, my purpose and - unbelievably - my business.
In October 2017 I was ‘between jobs’ having recently left a senior, soul-crushing position in media to do… what? I didn’t know. I just knew something had to change and - with the support of my amazing husband - took a leap of faith/desperation that wherever I ended up and whatever I did would be better than where I was headed if I stayed.
Reader, I’m so happy to tell you that leap paid off.
Today my life and my relationship with myself is almost unrecognisable from city-dwelling, fast-living, booze-addicted, self-sabotaging TJ 2017.
I live in woodland. I have a dog. I look after myself. I like myself. I set goals (and even achieve some of them!). I spend my time exactly as I want. I read every day. I have made so many amazing and wholesome new friends (including lots of authors I’ve met along the way ) and I’ve deepened my relationships with old ones and that amazing husband.
And building SHC into a global community and trusted brand has been a huge part of my personal development.
Last weekend I took on my biggest business project to date and created and hosted the first SHC ‘Book Nook’, a pop-up book shop and author care zone for a show at one of the world’s biggest expo centres, the Excel in London. And I’m pleased to say my team of amazing Shelfies and I ACED it. We created (quite literally, building and staging our area from the ground up on Friday night in high-vis!) a calm and positive book-filled space amongst the beautiful chaos that is a show for 15,000 people. Show guests loved discovering new titles and talking about self-help with fellow geeks, authors loved meeting their readers AND we sold a whole load of books. And this feels like a fitting milestone as we celebrate eight years of the Club. (I’m also very good at celebrating wins these days).
The fact that SHC is still here, surviving a pandemic, personal crises and economic doom and gloom, is definitely something to be celebrated. Statistically we’re not far off a business miracle. But I believe in miracles! And I believe in the magic of self-help.
And so to mark this auspicious occasion I thought I’d share some of the VIBs (Very Important Books) that have been a big part of our journey so far, as well as a DIY workshop gift for you (members can download this at the end of the email).
8 years
61 books
00s of authors
000s of members
A lot of yellow postcards
One ongoing Founder personal transformation (that’s me!)
And one goal that has never changed: to help you read more and feel better.
What a ride! Thanks for coming along (so far). I’d love to know if/how any of the books we’ve read have impacted you. Let me know by RSVP or in the Comments.
And here’s to another year of self-discovery and new friends.
Big love from SH HQ.
Toni 💛
8 years, 8 books
1. Freedom Seeker by Beth Kempton. BOTM #1 (Oct 2017)
This was our first BOTM (Book of the Month*) and author ’s first book (she’s currently working on #7). It’s full of ideas on how to create personal freedom (‘Live More. Worry Less. Do What You Love.’) which is exactly what I didn’t realise I was starting to do as I battled serious imposter syndrome to host Beth at our first author event at Soho House, Chiswick. I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing back then, but we were definitely doing what we loved (and I love that we have supported each other ever since).
2. Change Your Life in 7 Days by Paul McKenna. BOTM #16 (Jan 2019)
The one that started it all, and a reminder that the right book comes along when you’re ready. Just over 10 years ago, in a time we’ll call ‘rock bottom’ time, this one jumped out at me (quite literally) in an Oxfam book shop. It took me a year to read this book about changing your life in 7 days (ha!) because everything in it was so new to me (creating a vision for your life, the power of a positive perspective, neuroplasticity, an abundant mindset). And it changed everything. I’ve since read 600+ self-help books and I’ve interviewed Paul online several times, as well as meeting him in person on his latest book tour (at his personal invitation, no less). And I still dip in and out of this one as needed.
3. Help Me! by Marianne Power. BOTM #13 (Oct 2018)
Once up on a time, and I worked at the same newspaper for a couple of years, but we didn’t know it because I was online and she was on the paper and we were both chained to our desks with hardly time to breath, never mind socialise. Luckily we saw the light and left around the same time, her to write a brilliant and hilarious self-help book, while I was starting a self-help platform, and we ended up doing our first festival event together, chatting on a beaten up sofa in a gazebo in South Wales to an audience of my mates and their kids. Marianne is now a TED Talker and bestseller, and the gazebo has turned into The Big Retreat’s mega Talk Tent with a real stage and audiences in their 00s. And Help Me! remains one of my favourite self-help books to recommend to newbies.
4. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. BOTM #5 (Feb 2018) and BOTM #57 (Jan/Feb 2025)
So good we’ve read it twice. First in 2018 and again - the updated and extended version - in 2025, when author Hal joined us to kick off the new year with a re-introduction to his brilliant S.A.V.E.R.S. system for reinventing our mornings (Silence. Affirmations. Visualisation. Exercise. Reading. Scribing). A club favourite for a reason. This book can change your life.
5. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. BOTM #44 (Nov/Dec 2022)
A couple of years into running SHC I started noticing patterns, including that nobody wants to be doing self-help homework in the festive season. Instead, I started choosing fun or fictional books for the end of the year. Fiction can 100% support our self-development as we broaden our horizons and learn about life from new perspectives, and this book has so many underlying themes about human nature. And Booker Prize winner, Yann, agreeing to join us for a community Zoom showed me that SHC was becoming a platform that authors could really trust with their stories.
6. Self-care for Tough Times by Suzy Reading. BOTM #34 (Mar/Apr 2021)
We love Suzy (and I say ‘we’ because I have regular requests for Suzy appearances from the community), and we have featured two of her books over the years. This one was a huge support to all of us at the end of lockdown as we started to get back to the ‘new normal’, which actually wasn’t very normal at all. A brilliant book for anyone needing super simple ways to support themselves when life throws a curveball (I’ll be interviewing Suzy about her latest book, How to be Selfish, next month in the Club).
7. Happy Sexy Millionaire by Steven Bartlett. BOTM #36 (Jul/Aug 2021)
This was early DOAC days, but it was still an amazing surprise to see author Steven pop-up in one of our Book Club zooms after being invited in secret by one of our members. He was (is) a star with lots of brilliant advice, and I especially loved featuring this book because it was a slow burn for our members, who are generally a lot like middle-aged me and couldn’t image what they might learn from a 20-something millionaire tech bro, but who were total Steven converts by the end of our Read-along.
8. Today Was Fun by Bree Groff. BOTM #61 (Sept/Oct 2025)
Our most recent BOTM, and a true Substack love affair. I slid into Bree’s DMs after reading her guest post for over the summer, and thinking that her book was the perfect read to harness the ‘back to school’ energy of September (I LOVE that this platform gives us such great direct access to new authors). We hosted a Substack live to announce Today Was Fun as our BOTM, and the book sold out in the UK shortly after. I’m not sure I can take full credit for that but the amazing sent care packages to UK readers who weren’t able to get a copy - including books and post-its and brownies - meaning she’s a Club favourite for life.
You can check out our interview with Bree HERE:
You can see the FULL ARCHIVE of 61 books on the SHC website HERE.
*NB We read one book every month until November 2019 when we started reading one book every two months as a way to better process - and action - what we were/are learning.
