The many books of Paul Wilson

Having no affiliation with any particular school or philosophy, he became one of the first freelance meditation teaches around Sydney. Which meant in years to come he would be equally at home sharing his knowledge in secular environments, Buddhist environments, Christian environments, yoga school and, most of all, at his own centre – the Calm Centre.

Fast forward to the eighties...

Wilson is teaching meditation at the Calm Centre. The handbook he writes, The Calm Technique, has been picked up by an Australian book publisher who turns it into a local best-seller. Six months later it is published in the US. The calm is spreading.

With around 30 titles in 24 languages, Wilson's calm books command a lot of shelf place.

Fast forward to the nineties...

Now there is not just one Paul Wilson 'calm' title, but dozens of them. Wilson has become the biggest-selling author in several countries, particularly in Europe. He has a number of Number 1 bestsellers. In the UK he not only has Number 1s, he has five books in the Top 10 - simultaneously - a feat that has only ever been equalled once. By Roald Dahl.

Fast forward to the late nineties...

It is impossible to calculate exactly how many of these 'calm' books are in circulation, but as at the close of the century, there are at least 10 million. At least. Possibly many millions more.

So ubiquitous is this suite of calm (and related) titles that they are regularly lampooned in newspaper cartoons and the like without any attempt to add background or context. Intimate knowledge of the backstory public is assumed.

Check out the very first episode of the comedy series, Black Books. And the more recent Peter Rabbit movie. And other popular shows like QI.

Genre and imitators

At one of the Frankfurt Book Fairs - a year where Wilson was a guest speaker - the unofficial description of the fair was "the Calm fair" because it seemed like every second agent or publisher was hawking a potential book with "calm" in the title or subtitle.

That was the year when thousands of "Little Books of" - almost all of them copying Wilson's Little Book of Calm shape, size and graphic formula - came onto the market. (Most publishers were unaware that it was impossible to turn a profit with sales of less than a hundreds of thousand or so copies.

In that same year, one of the world's largest publishers (no, we're not game to publish their name here) produced a pseudo Book of Calm, with a mashup design of two Wilson calm covers, with content so similar that even the mistakes were reproduced, with no author name diclosed on the front cover and even, as was later revealed, with the author having interviewed one of Wilson's employees.

Even in 2018 the copying continues. To the extent that one publisher even came up with the inspired decision to introduce a book with exactly the same title as the book which not only created the category/genre and but was still in print.

And people wonder why the book industry is in trouble.