Perhaps you’ve noticed that your local bookstore has various card decks displayed near cash registers and filling up the impulse-purchase shelves. Or maybe your favorite self-help author just adapted their best-selling book into a snazzy new deck of cards. The current card deck trend goes beyond your traditional tarot deck or a collector’s edition of playing cards. Instead, this new crop of paper products is geared toward activities, conversation starters, or introspection.
Purchasing the Hack Your Nervous System deck in 2023 opened my eyes to a modern, accessible corner of the publishing world. I noticed this new type of card deck everywhere: astrology decks, mindfulness decks, even cheeseboard decks! Where are the sobriety decks?!? I wondered. That’s when the idea for The Sobriety Deck was born. (I host the Recovery Rocks podcast with Lisa Smith, a fellow sobriety author.)
I had just submitted my first manuscript, and I was eager to start another creative project. My agent, Eric Smith, hadn’t represented paper products before, but he and P.S. Literary, the agency he worked for at the time, were down to try something new.
“I’ve frequently been pulled toward work that’s a little out of the box. Or in Tawny and Lisa’s case, in a box,” says Eric, who now runs the boutique agency Neighborhood Literary. “Card decks and paper products reach the kind of reader who revels in having a beautiful object in their home.” Whether your home decor is in its Hostingcore era or you’re more Vintage Renaissance, there’s a card deck that’s perfect for any home aesthetic.
But are people replacing books and journals with decks? Not quite. “Decks are definitely having a moment, but they aren’t replacing other ancillary formats, like workbooks or journals—they’re really just another vehicle for content,” says Angelin Adams, editorial director of gift, design, entertainment, and culture at Clarkson Potter, which published The Sobriety Deck. Both Lisa and I have written books, but we also know that some people just don’t read books for various reasons. We wanted to create an accessible resource for our podcast listeners; a card deck seemed like the perfect fit.
“At Potter, we think about the use-case of our gift products early and often,” Adams says. “How can a deck help support the author’s content and service the audience? Not all content works in deck form—there’s a randomization built into a card deck, and you want to be sure that doesn’t get in the way of the consumer’s experience. And some content is too long-form for decks. But when it works, it really works!”
Creating a card deck was a master class in copywriting and killing darlings. We distilled five years of podcast episodes and three decades of combined research on addiction and mental health into 50 cards with 100–200 words per card.
Bartender and recipe book author John deBary had a similar experience when adapting his cocktail book, Drink What You Want, into a card deck with the same name. “We had to trim some recipes to make the content fit into bullet points,” he shared. But recipe cards can be a functional alternative to the clunkiness of trying to keep a recipe book open while preparing a drink or a meal. “People raised on smartphones are used to seeing recipes as a solid, phone-shaped item instead of flipping a page,” he says.
Generational differences, our ever-shrinking attention spans, and technological advancements are also at play in the rising ubiquity of card decks. “It makes sense that card decks are everywhere, given the TikTokification of publishing,” says Jess Elefante, director of strategic initiatives at McNally Jackson bookstore and author of Raising Hell, Living Well, “Readers might enjoy pulling a card or two instead of reading a whole book.” Thus, card decks can serve as a gateway into learning about a subject or discovering the author’s existing books. “Our expectation of immediate satisfaction keeps growing,” says CeCe Lyra, literary agent and co-host of the popular publishing podcast The Shit No One Tells You about Writing. “Short attention spans are often seen as negative world traits (and often rightfully so), but card decks can have the potential to feed this desire in a healthy way.”
The one-card-at a-time approach is also popping up in therapeutic settings. Jor-El Caraballo, LMHC, author of Meditations for Black Men, uses card decks and workbooks with clients. “Card decks can help clients find new opportunities for more insight,” he said. “From there, we process their reactions and findings in session. We then make connections to their present life circumstances to see if there’s any learning to take away from that.” Caraballo is currently adapting The Shadow Work Workbook into a card deck.
Bottom line: Our experience writing, pitching, and promoting The Sobriety Deck was much smoother than writing, pitching, and promoting our books. Adams said, “It’s important for authors and agents to understand that decks don’t follow the same workflow or sales cycle as books.” And, he said, “They don’t get reviewed like books do, nor do they qualify for the New York Times bestseller list. They also don’t go out in the same numbers like books do—sales build year over year, and it’s not uncommon for us to sell more of a deck in years two and three than in year one.” It’s ironic that a product designed for quick use usually needs time to take off.
Tawny Lara is the author of Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up without the Booze and co-author of The Sobriety Deck. She teaches virtual courses on publishing and DIY publicity for authors.
Tawny Lara is the author of Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up without the Booze and co-author of The Sobriety Deck. She teaches virtual courses on publishing and DIY publicity for authors.
