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Comments (224)

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  uberex
  4 hour work weeks is:Draw circle: Set up a highly successful business (prerequisite)Rest of owl: Delegate stuff (what the book says to do).It is pretty useless. Not suprised sales have declined especially since startups probably got harder since when it was written.
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  __alexander
  Personally, I see the self-help industry dying because people are starting to realize that it’s just a network of individuals selling products, promoting each other’s products, and creating new avenues to sell more products. I refer to it as the “self-help mafia.” Tim Ferriss kind of created it.
• rhipitr
  I think AI will accelerate this, but I think YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts have splintered the market so much there’s not as much space for mega self-help stars anymore, just a lot of middle class ones.
• edelbitter
  >The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.
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  heisenbit
  Some of the best books on JS which were online went recently off-line for that reason. Blog post by the author: https://2ality.com/ (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer)
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  noveltyaccount
  I have read countless self help books where I complained about fluffy filler material and the book should have been fifty pages instead of two hundred. Not a surprise to me that a topic distilled through an LLM is a better experience.
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  chris_money202
  Something not mentioned that links to both LLM training AND drop in book sales... Anna's Archive
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  _pdp_
  > Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans.On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
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  throwawaypub
  I work for a large online news publisher, one of the oldest in the US. Our traffic is down 50% in year. We likely won’t survive for much longer.
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  SkyPuncher
  This stat is limited to print-books only. He talks about all sorts of other forms of content, but seems to mysteriously miss audio books.If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).[0] - https://electroiq.com/stats/audiobook-statistics/
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  havblue
  I'm going to admit that I tend to hit a brick wall when these books tell me I need to fill out a worksheet if I really want to make a difference. You're telling me I have to do homework now? But ai can give me feedback on my thoughts anyway, directly what I'm interested in, and provide sources, even though it's probably patronizing me? Not a difficult decision.
• nfcampos
  I think the same will be true of the ‘popular science’ category of nonfiction
• anon
  undefined
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  raziel2701
  In my corner of the internet people started to recommend reading fiction rather than self-help. Books like the count of montecristo for example, where the characters overcome through perseverance, patience and planning.The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?
• jdw64
  I wonder if the '1,000 True Fans' concept, which is basically a traditional model, will still work these days. That aside, isn't the hacking style self help genre itself a kind of outdated relic? Honestly, I've read some of this author's books, and they have a distinctly optimistic 2000s to 2010s vibe. Over time, the delivery of knowledge and methodologies changes. Maybe the issue is that the content no longer fits the times.Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?'And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage:'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.'We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.
• MollyRealized
  He speaks to three examples: YT videos, podcasts, and newsletters/etc. With YT videos and podcasts, I either yank the transcript and pipe it through whisper.cpp, or with YT videos, I'll use the built-in "Ask [Gemini]" and ask it to summarize.
• itissid
  Still too narrow a take on what self help techniques are killable by ai. I also think self help as a bunch of life hacks and habits is precisely what’s wrong with the industry writ large. They are based on what sells in a capitalist system targeting the attention economy. Creating scarcity on supply side of attention(work longer) and demand side(addictive apps). Take Atomic Habits, one of the things it says is out of many is making the habit you want to form easy to do, e.g place sneakers and shorts next to your bed to make a habit to run in the morning. It presumes a lot about how exactly habits are actually internalized, retained and how one falls into or out of them. I’ve fallen in and out of such habits even after I did them for a while(months). Techniques are very ripe to disruption because people don’t quite understand or have time to understand or observe their own mental state, so hacks sell because you can do them(presumably) as a monkey would.It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.
• r0s
  Almost zero readers buy a book based on the title or content alone. They buy Dr.Phil because they saw him on TV and know a bit about who he is. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people buying books because they respect and admire the author's other work.AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
• GreenSalem
  Good to see a whole genre of scam artists and their books being displaced.
• lancewiggs
  The rise in sales of GLP-1 products also coincides with the decline in self-help books. Those products are highly effective at delivering some of the hardest self-help outcomes, so why buy a book when you can inject?
• Aboutplants
  AI is probably only a small portion of it. I’m betting most self-help content is consumed via short form video these days and typically done by paid influencers. It’s just shifted from his outdated model
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  vova_hn2
  > How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)- text is much quicker and cheaper to produceYet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
• mrandish
  I think the core problem of most self-help books is that at best, they're usually an article's worth of knowledge and insight stretched to book length for economic reasons.To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
• pianopatrick
  Personally for me I realized I could learn everything from YouTube for free so I stopped buying most books, just to save money.
• daytonix
  "Self-help" readers are probably moving from self-help books to llms because they give them the shallow "fix my life" and "get rich quick" answers they want at a faster rate. Now the redpillers have to think even less about why they are such losers.Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
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  dcdgo
  I recently picked up a book at the airport called "Full Stack Human". Wish I hadn't because every second line has "It's not just about X - It's also about Y!" formatting that screamed LLM generated slop. I'd say it most certainly is dead!
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  wps
  I never understood how anyone could write more than 40 pages of “self help”. Especially not for a general audience. All self help boils down to the very foundation of your worldview, all other advice stems from it.
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  innocentoldguy
  Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.
• zem
  self help books aren't really my thing, but I have to say I love the guy's attitude in that post.
• bitwize
  Nothing of value would be lost if it did. I feel the same way about the OnlyFans economy.
• neves
  Probably podcasts killed them.
• darepublic
  There's a lot of self help YouTube videos.
• maxclark
  The average non fiction book is 200 pages, can be summarized in under 10, and is repackaging someone else’s ideasLiterary slop being replaced with AI
• anon
  undefined
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  delichon
  Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.
• themafia
  Probably not. And you certainly cannot use a retrospective analysis to answer this question.What you needed was a survey.
• operatingthetan
  >But looking more closely, Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively). The exceptions alone could make an interesting blog post for another time.Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
• aussieguy1234
  Hardly. I've read several good ones during the AI era and I'm still reading them.However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.I'm also in an actual informal bookclub with a few friends. It started in the AI era, all nonfiction books and is still going strong.Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
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  submeta
  I suspect AI is replacing my need for productivity content much faster than it’s replacing my need for books.I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.But I still buy books.The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
• sublinear
  I'm more curious how Publisher's Weekly defines "sales" in this era of subscription plans (e.g. Kindle Unlimited).Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
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  mwkaufma
  Grifter publishing-slop sector devastated by slop automation.
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  Finnucane
  Makes sense. Self-help books are kinda the human slop of the publishing business. Easily replaced by AI slop? Probably.
• keybored
  > [the numbers]> Let that sink in for a minute.Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?The self-involved industry is in shambles.> What’s actually going on?Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.---I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
• josefritzishere
  Betteridge's law of headlines applies. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." Why would anyone ask AI?
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  vova_hn2
  > What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
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  dvh
  Now I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?
• yieldcrv
  everyone has their own contribution to this observationbut how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the restits the law of diminishing returnsthis may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identifiedbut just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
• uwagar
  author says:Before we dive into my dirty laundry,dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?
• mrbonner
  [dead]
• Nition
  [dead]
• formvoltron
  has bruv updated said book to include tips on using AI to automate?
• throwaw12
  unfortunately, as a reader, I am not buying any books post-ChatGPT era. Author maybe did their best, but it anyways feels like I will be buying ChatGPT's opinion