The First Few Weeks of The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being

The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being was officially released on the 21st of April, and it’s been an adventure every day since!

In the few weeks that the book has been in readers’ hands, I’ve had so much feedback that the book is helpful, friendly, insightful, and accessible, which has been music to my ears. I wanted to create a self-help book that was like a warm and knowledgeable therapist that you could access whenever you needed to, and that was written for trans people by a trans therapist, so to know that I’ve hit the mark has been lovely. I’m so glad that the book has already been able to help people in just a few weeks.

Katy Lees – a white, mid-fat, non-binary person with blue hair and glasses – smiles happily at the camera. They are sitting on a wooden chair and holding a copy of their book, The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being. There are art prints on the wall behind them.

To celebrate the launch, I teamed up with BookWyrm book shop in Durham to throw a party.

As part of the book launch party, the lovely Miles and Chris from BookWyrm made some of my words in to zines to giveaway with each copy of The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being, as well as bookmarks for each guest to take away. I’ve been meaning to make a zine for ages, so this was something cute to tick off my bucket list.

Two zines lie overlapping each other. The cover says ‘You’ll Never Be 100% Ready (So do it anyway) Katy Lees’.

I’ve also signed about thirty books over the last fortnight, if not more, to go to friends, family, good causes like Books Beyond Bars, to buy from the BookWyrm shop, and at the party for each guest. I’ve loved customising them to what each person wants as much as I can.

Party guest Arwen watches while Katy signs their copy of the book.
Party guest Arwen poses happily while Katy signs their copy of the book.

My lovely fiancée also knocked it out of the park with this giant book-shaped cake, which was an absolute dream come true. It was a chocolate orange cake and immensely heavy!

A photo of a large cake. It is designed to look like a copy of The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well- being.
A video of Katy slicing the book-shaped cake, to the audible amazement of the guests. The cake lies on a trans flag made of icing, which is also on a table covered in trans flags and rainbow flags.
Katy is holding a slice of cake with their own name on it. They are smiling and their eyebrows are raised mischievously.

The launch event was rounded off my a book reading. I’ve done this before, but this was the first time the reading was streamed on Instagram, so it was another first for me. I’m hoping to do more readings at other bookshops in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes and ears peeled!

Katy reads from their book in front of party guests. They are pushing their hair back while reading with a look of concentration on their face.

Over the next few months there are more things planned around The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being, including interviews and giveaways. Thank you so much for your support, and I hope you love the book!

The Trans Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being is available in all good book stores! If you buy straight from my publishers, use the code TRANSGUIDE for 15% off your copy. Click here for your copy!

If you liked reading this piece of writing, please also consider donating to this amazing fund! It helps Black people in the UK access free therapy.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s