Commentary: ChatGPT moved my cheese – AI is unsettling the self-help shelf
Instant summaries sound the death knell for the bullet-point books that prey on our insecurities, says Emma Jacobs for the Financial Times.
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LONDON: Want to pick up seven habits to become highly effective? Win friends and influence people? Okay, how about discovering who moved your cheese?
You could buy a self-help book, or, cheaper and quicker, just ChatGPT the highlights. According to self-help guru Tim Ferriss – author of The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape The 9–5, Live Anywhere and Join The New Rich – generative AI is killing the how-to publishing industry.
Recently, Ferriss wrote in a blog post: “Using my own books as the cadaver on the table, [this is] what a fatality looks like,” mapping out sales for his five books, including The 4-Hour Body and Tools Of Titans (my favourite title of the last 10 years). His chart showed a small dip in 2023, the year after ChatGPT was launched, followed by ever-steeper declines. Ominously, he predicted his catalogue “will sell roughly 80 per cent fewer copies in 2026 than it did in 2022”.
Perhaps his readers are just following his own advice? “Doing less”, he wrote in 4HWW, “is the path of the productive”. In any case, as he put it in the recent blog post, in words that will depress bibliophiles everywhere, he “never got into writing because of unit economics [but] because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know”.
Guess Word
Crack the word, one row at a time
Buzzword
Create words using the given letters
Mini Sudoku
Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser
Mini Crossword
Small grid, big challenge
Word Search
Spot as many words as you can
WHY BUY THE BOOK FOR FIVE BULLET POINTS?
It is hard to extrapolate from one man’s oeuvre. But Ferriss also cites figures from Publisher’s Weekly showing a wider trend of self-help book sales in the first quarter experiencing a drop of 26.3 per cent compared to the same period in 2025. Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F***, declared last year that “self-help’s kind of cooked”.
Pippa Wright, publishing director at Penguin Life, has a word of caution: Non-fiction “has always been boom and bust. At the point it goes up, everyone says, ‘No one is interested in fiction, they want answers.’ And then romantasy goes up and everyone wants escapism”.
According to NielsenIQ BookData for the United Kingdom, while sales have declined from their 2022 peak, they remain significantly higher than in 2015.
Wright thinks one kind of self-help has “probably gone”: The “prescriptive book with five bullet points, with information that is summarised very easily … If it can be summarised in a paragraph, then why buy the book?” She says readers weigh these things up when deciding what to buy, and are looking for cutting-edge research, expertise or strong writing.
Some point to a wider decline in self-improvement, as witnessed by the recent backlash to Diary Of A CEO podcaster Steven Bartlett’s declaration that a few glasses of wine “ruined three days of [his] life” because “I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day …. Then I podcasted worse, and I didn’t go to the gym the day after.”
NEW WAYS TO CASH IN
But there’s a long tradition here and a lasting appetite. Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, published in 1859, was the first of so many such books.
As Joe Pine, author of The Transformation Economy, says: “People partake in the self-help industry because most of us are bundles of aspirations, seeking to improve our circumstances, our capabilities, our behaviours, our selves. We generally feel – and are – inadequate to the task, so people traditionally sought guidance primarily from books.”
As long as insecurities and social comparison exist, there will be a market for self-improvement. And advice gets repackaged for new generations – just look at Silicon Valley’s renewed embrace of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.
Self-help advisers will find new ways to cash in on our vulnerabilities.
A number of gurus, including Manson, Tony Robbins and Gabby Bernstein, are creating coaching apps. “If I don’t do it,” Bernstein told the Wall Street Journal, “someone else is going to do it in a way that’s not in alignment with my truth.” And we all know, the truth will out – or set us free. Perhaps there’s a how-to book in that?
Source: Financial Times/zw(ch)
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