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Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport
Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure version of the information?
All IMO:
Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI.
It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination.
OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI.
I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants.
Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.
Self-help is not the canary for other genre. Self-help doesn't comme with significant art. Their consumer gets a better experience through LLM that extracts the substance and contextualizes it.
It doesn't tell what will happen at scale regarding fiction and other content where people tends to expect a genuine human contribution. Sure you can get success with AI-written or AI-assisted writing, but it doesn't mean human written books will no longer catch interest.
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.
-Before the internet, space to publish anything was scarce (and so were methods of finding specific information if it did exist), so newspapers/magazines were valuable and textbooks/guides were great media.
It was difficult to find extremely specific information because a lot of information was so niche it wasn't worth publishing, or because it wasn't worth the effort to find something SO specific.
-The internet made publishing space infinite and search easy, so specific information became super valuable, e.g. "how to do x in 5 steps" blogs. They architected information in ways that wouldn't have been worth publishing in a regional newspaper or small-circulation magazine, but was economically viable at worldwide scale and when publishing was free.
This is the era this article describes.
-Then everything went mainstream and the above production of content was often more frequently done by large companies, with bloggers and other individuals filling even smaller niches
-Now that LLMs have vacuumed all of that up and you can create even more specific content for free, instantly (e.g. you no longer need a generic tutorial on "how to start a business" but summon one that already knows your prior skills etc.)
This has made the previous era of "how-to" content less useful because you can decide whether you want expert/beginner/intermediate level content and what personality etc.)
Now the frontier is first-person narratives and opinions, because even specific information is no longer the constraint.
It all hinges on this statement. But I’m not sure it’s really AI that’s doing it, and not just a contributing factor. There’s higher cost of living, inflation, economic uncertainty, seemingly looming financial crisis, etc. A lot of impactful things happened!
1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth.
So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing.
Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing.
In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all.
In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc.
The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)
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.
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).
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?
The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage.
Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.
Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful.
A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.
From a new language to public speaking to media training.Some books need more than structure by AI, that is professional knowledge and real-life experience. AI has a vast information ocean, yet a travel book helped me prepare my underwater kit because WiFi does not work underwater, saving me a lot of money I could have wasted on wireless kit.
Take AI apps for teaching languages,Langua is a good example, I think the most successful ones combine human instructors for insights and guidance with AI for drills prescribed and calibrated by the tutor. AI drills are not the same.
AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view.
What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust.
EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.
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?
I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.
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.
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 produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
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.
Now most are just a 300 page self pitch for some subscription or another product.
Most self help books are too general to be useful to anyone. You're writing your own guidebook for an audience of one.
If you really like to do the things, you will spend many hours on it.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no
Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.
Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
The vast majority of self-help books out there are ghost-written upsales trash.
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.
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.
If Famous Athlete/Entrepreneur writes a self-help type book, people will buy it, because the fame lends legitimacy. Even if the book itself is obviously written by AI.
With an additional caveat: the person needs to have some real, demonstrable authority. Tim Ferris doesn’t really have authority in the sense of “I am a professional athlete” or “I am billionaire startup founder” does. He does have authority as a podcaster and digital products / books creator, but that isn’t what the 4HWW is about.
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.
At some time, the market has been satisfied.
Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"
What you needed was a survey.
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.
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.
Only mental health and longevity remain outstanding.
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.
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.
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?
Remember, Tim Ferris scammed his audience with NFTs lmfao.
Literary slop being replaced with AI
> 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.
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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.
There's no life lessons you'll learn reading self help-books that you won't get by just reading the classics.
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
Self-help as a domain is absolutely stuffed with this sort of behaviour, where 300 pages just repeat and spin variations on an extremely simple premise, again and again. The reader tags along, sure there's going to be a twist or next level, but in reality it's just trying to justify this being sold as a "book", when at most it could be a single blog entry.
And yes, every single one of Tim Ferriss' books follows this principal. Entire books can be condensed into one page summaries and absolutely nothing will be lost. Nothing. In many cases one paragraph. Sometimes a single sentence.
This problem afflicts all media. There's a "Glucose Goddess" woman who has made an endless series of videos after she had a book do numbers about reducing glucose spikes. She's spinning four bullet points into endless content and it's just a perfect example. Nothing new or revelatory is being shared, but someone made a whole grifting career on this, all to pitch overpriced vitamins and protein powders.
It's actually interesting that someone mentioned YouTube replacing documentaries because people don't have time for that, so to speak, but YouTube is an absolute scourge of time wasting bullshit. I remember years ago one Apple-sphere guy posting a 10 minute video to answer the question "Should you get 8GB or 16GB in your Macbook". Ten minutes of yapping -- apparently ten minutes was the baseline for getting some monetization metric -- and the answer was an unqualified, worthless "get 16GB", because feels or something.
YouTube recently added an "Ask" AI button, and it includes generating extremely good summaries of videos. So many videos propose some clickbait headline with a clickbait graphic proposing some novel revelation, and in the first few seconds I've seen the summary, see that they have added absolutely nothing new or of value, and click back.
Will these people also post complaints about the drop in viewership about worthless, time inconsiderate content dragging not hitting like it once did? Probably. "Back in my day you could make a career by posting shocked-face thumbnail, a Betteridge's law of headlines question that you promise to answer, and then meander for twenty minutes. Kids these days just don't have the attention span anymore!"
Before we dive into my dirty laundry,
dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?