Five years …and fifteen thousand readers later

This spring it will be five years since the publication of my book ‘Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice.’ In academic publishing these days the success of a book is judged not by how many physical copies are sold but by how often it's downloaded or ‘accessed.’ This is because the main readership are students, researchers and academics who are usually reading an electronic copy of the book from their university library. This makes it hard for authors to know what kind of impact their book has had so I was very grateful to receive some data recently from my publisher – Palgrave Macmillan – which gave me some details of the book's readership.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my book has been downloaded 15.6K times since it was first published in 2018. It’s also been ‘cited’ (that’s to say other authors have referenced it) fourteen times in articles, book chapters, proceedings and monographs. Citations are another way of measuring the impact of an academic book. In terms of where my main readership is, in the past 12 months it’s been accessed mostly by readers in the US, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK but it has readers everywhere, from China to Turkey. It’s good to know that readers and researchers globally still find my ideas on creativity and wellbeing relevant, five years on.