The very readers who might be uninterested in or turned off by the subject of personal finance are exactly the readers who most stand to benefit from financial advice. This season, publishers are looking to reach those readers by releasing titles that view money matters through a wider cultural lens, with books centered on women, mindfulness, and Millennials and children.

Purse Strings

According to a figure often quoted in the financial press, women drive anywhere from 70% to 85% of all consumer purchases. So it’s not surprising that several new books aim to help women manage their money.

Jen Sincero—whose 2013 self-help title, You Are a Badass, has sold 555,000 print copies per Nielsen BookScan—zeros in on financial matters with a follow-up, You Are a Badass at Making Money (Viking, 2017). In the book, she draws on her experiences scraping by and living in a converted garage in her 40s. “I believe if my broke ass can be making money, anybody can do it,” she says. Her cheeky attitude carries through to chapter titles such as “Why You Ain’t Rollin’ in the Cheddah. Yet.” In another chapter, “Allowance,” she writes, “One of the biggest obstacles to making lots of money is not a lack of good ideas or opportunities or time, or that we’re too slovenly or stupid, it’s that we refuse to give ourselves permission to become rich.”

Sincero wants readers to release their guilt, shame, and loathing around money, and she wants them to stop treating money as if it were “as loaded a topic as sex and relationships,” she says. Or perhaps it’s more loaded: “I wrote a book about lesbian sex 10 years ago,” she says, “and I feel that this is scarier to put out in the world.”

Amanda Steinberg, founder of personal-finance advice site DailyWorth and savings and investment platform WorthFM, says that her goal in Worth It (North Star Way, Jan. 2017) is to teach women to take charge of their financial lives. Like Sincero, Steinberg writes from experience. Despite years of following traditional advice to increase her income and curb spending, in 2008 the combination of a massive, unforeseen tax bill and the purchase of an old house landed her $100,000 in debt.

“Women tend to treat budgeting and income as the most important aspects of managing their money,” Steinberg says. “It’s not that these things are unimportant. But taking that view, you don’t see the big picture, much less grasp the depth of thinking and technique that goes into producing something of lasting value, because you’re caught up in busywork.”

Another title that takes women’s financial empowerment as its theme is Smart Women Love Money (Regan Arts, Mar. 2017) by Alice Finn, a financial and wealth-management adviser and the founder of PowerHouse Assets, which bills itself as “smart investing for women by women.” Finn believes that understanding money is the key to true independence, and her book, according to the publisher, offers “a program to bridge the gender gap in investing and to get women excited about financial planning.”

Cents and Sensibility

The concept of mindfulness is everywhere these days, even to be found in such publications as cookbooks and coloring books. Next up: titles that take a thoughtful, holistic approach to personal finance.

In February 2017, New World Library is publishing Mindful Money by Jonathan K. DeYoe, a financial planner and longtime practitioner of Buddhism whose DeYoe Wealth Management oversees more than $250 million for foundations and families. Having long thought he had a book in him, DeYoe decided to write it because one of his clients told him that he had to. That client was The Color Purple author Alice Walker. “When Alice Walker says you have to write a book, you have to write a book,” DeYoe says. (Walker contributes the foreword.)

In Mindful Money, DeYoe urges readers to keep in mind what makes them happy and to keep things simple: “Less noise, better outcomes,” he says. In other words, don’t get distracted by news stories and don’t let the panic of others affect you—have a financial plan in place and stick to it. “Capitalism and the economy will have zigs and zags,” he says. “The big picture is still intact.”

Leanne Jacobs, a self-described holistic wealth expert, promotes an attitude of positivity and abundance in Beautiful Money (TarcherPerigee, Jan. 2017). Her four-week wealth makeover plan includes exercises aimed at helping readers clarify their financial goals and set priorities that reflect their core values.

The Seven Money Types by Tommy Brown (Zondervan, Mar. 2017), a pastor and financial strategist, prompts readers to identify with one of seven Old Testament figures based on personality traits, and shows how these traits affect one’s attitude toward money. For example, hospitable Abrahams “may completely blow the budget (if they have one)” on “giving gifts, throwing parties, entertaining others, supporting charities, and other hospitable endeavors,” he writes. Abrahams, Brown suggests, “might consider setting a strict budget for these types of expenditures.”

Using literary, cinematic, and historical allusions rather than biblical ones, Mihir A. Desai’s The Wisdom of Finance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2017) highlights the connection between finance and morality: both, according to Desai, have to do with pursuing and creating value. Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School and a professor of law at Harvard Law School, illustrates the concept of risk management, for example, by examining the actions of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Phineas Finn’s Violet Effingham as they contemplate whom to marry.

David Clark is coauthor of several books with Mary Buffett, including the 2006 Scribner title The Tao of Warren Buffett (70,000 print copies sold, per BookScan). In The Tao of Charlie Munger (Scribner, Jan. 2017), Clark gives similar attention to Munger, Buffett’s longtime business partner and the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. “His philosophy is one of rational patience,” Clark says of his new subject. This philosophy is illustrated in quotations from Munger such as the following: “It is in the nature of stock markets that they go down. So people suffer then. Conservative investing and steady saving without expecting miracles is the way to go.”

The Next Generation

Think Millennials and finance and one of two types may spring to mind: the entrepreneur who made a kajillion dollars dreaming up a viral app or artisanal condiment, or, more typically, the debt-saddled grad who’s being subsidized by the parents.

Stephanie Bowen, a senior editor at TarcherPerigee, edited two forthcoming books written by and for Millennials, whose titles reference both ends of this Millennials-and-finance spectrum: Rich20Something by Daniel DiPiazza (May 2017) and Broke Millennial by Erin Lowry (May 2017). The consumer demand for such books is there, Bowen says: “Millennials are looking for books written by people who’ve been in their shoes and get where they’re coming from.”

Lowry—who confesses on her Broke Millennial website that she’s not, in fact, broke, thanks to a savvy choice of college that allowed her to graduate debt-free—addresses in her book the evolving money issues faced by those in their 20s and 30s. Chapters such as “Paying Rent to Your ’Rents—Overcoming the Emotional and Financial Battles of Living at Home After College” and “Student Loans: How to Handle Them Without Having a Full-On Panic Attack” tackle financial dilemmas common to recent grads. Other chapters cover topics of interest to more financially established readers, such as investing, financial planning, and buying a home.

Rich20Something, Bowen says, tackles the financial concerns of the same demographic from a different angle: DiPiazza, an entrepreneur and marketing-strategy consultant, “shows Millennials who are over the whole nine-to-five-slog thing how to identify and monetize their skills and use those to start an awesome business and build the rich life and career they want.”

When the oldest of today’s Millennials were still young teenagers, Beth Kobliner’s Get a Financial Life (Simon & Schuster, 1996) was urging Gen Xers to sort out their financial situations. The book has sold more than 109,000 print copies since 2001, per BookScan. In April 2017, Touchstone is releasing a revised and updated fourth edition. A third of the content is new since the last revision, with most of the updates addressing digitization—navigating robo-advisers, getting the most from budgeting apps, and protecting against identify theft.

In addition to updating Get a Financial Life, Kobliner, who now has three children between ages 12 and 21, has written Make Your Kid a Money Genius (Even If You’re Not) (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 2017). “We really should be talking to our kids about money,” she says. “Money seems to be the last taboo.” Children as young as three can grasp some economic concepts, such as delayed gratification, “the skill a kid needs to wait for that spot on the swings,” Kobliner explains. “It’s that same skill that allows children to wait and save for that collection of Star Wars figures, rather than blowing their cash on some smaller item that tempts them along the way.”

Kobliner sees Money Genius as both a money book and a parenting book, and she’s thinking long term. If parents read Money Genius, Kobliner says, then in 20 years their children won’t need Get a Financial Life.

​Caroline Waxler, author of Stocking Up on Sin (Wiley), has written for Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.

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Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the imprint that is releasing Make Your Kid a Money Genius (Even If You're Not). The correct imprint is Simon & Schuster.