Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future

My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago.

Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily.

But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that’s happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.

So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like.

First, some broader stats

For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that “adult nonfiction” was down 9% from Q1 2025. Who knows… maybe in line with historical fluctuations?

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. 

But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend.

So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years.

My personal sales numbers

Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio.

Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication. The sales have been surprisingly durable… and predictable. These books have long been an annuity that I could count on.

But alas!

There’s trouble in paradise:

Let that sink in for a minute.

ChatGPT, powered by the updated GPT-3.5 model, launched on November 30, 2022.

There was a gentle -5% slip in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use. 

But what about ebooks and audio?

Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.

Now, there are caveats, of course.

We could talk about Amazon stocking changes, post-pandemic shifts of spending, a few potential exceptions, reversion to the mean after outlier events (e.g., TikTok virality of The 4-Hour Body in 2024, thanks to Gary Brecka), and so on.

But, even if I try my best to steelman a counter-argument… it’s all fancy-talk and wishful thinking. I don’t believe any constellation of footnotes begins to explain a near-vertical drop in prescriptive nonfiction.

Many of the strongest self-help franchises on the planet—standout darlings with perennial dominance—are also getting hammered. These are the best performers. You see them on endcaps everywhere books are sold. But if you look at BookScan sales for 2025 vs 2026 thus far, and do a little math, it ain’t pretty. If you rightly assume that self-help books tend to sell the most copies in H1, the biggest names I could think of will be down ~40-60%.

My agent, who has decades of statements to compare against, put it bluntly: 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that’s really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI.

Some publishers point to the growth of YouTube and podcasts, and those certainly contribute, but I think they are relative rounding errors.

What’s actually going on?

Think about what my books are, functionally speaking.

On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as a Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.

In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book.

In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books—and thousands of others—that will give you a personalized protocol in 15 seconds, adjusted for your bodyweight, your schedule, your injuries, and your aversion to cottage cheese.

Now, can I share some compelling counter-arguments? Yes, and I will, but the trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The broad trend will spare (next to) no one in the advice business.

Is prescriptive nonfiction the canary in the coal mine?

If “how-to” books are getting crushed because LLMs seem to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized advice… What’s next on the chopping block? Or, what is vulnerable to being replaced by AI-generated alternatives?

• 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?
  
• Prescriptive podcasts. A huge portion of podcast listening—including a lot of my show—is mining conversations for actionable advice. If an AI can extract, summarize, and personalize the takeaways from 800+ episodes, how many people still press play? The AI alternatives, or summaries, will provide whatever format you prefer: text, audio, video, or whatever comes next. Based on technology that I’ve seen demo’d, Ready Player One (maybe minus the haptics) is a lot closer than people think.
  
• Online courses, newsletters, advice blogs. Same logic. Anything with a core value proposition of “transferring instructions from my head to yours” is now competing with an interface that does it instantly, conversationally, and for free.

My position—and I’d genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.

What does this mean for search that depends on ads? What does this mean for journalism that depends on ads and subscribers?

What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.

Per Pew Research, 83% of Americans haven’t paid for news in any form in the past year. And when they slam into a paywall? A mere 1% pull out a credit card. I have used various tools to get around paywalls, as I don’t want to have 100 new subscriptions, but in the revenue arms race, those tools are getting beaten by new publisher tools. So what happens? I prompt LLMs to give me a summary of the linked articles, and they do it beautifully. There’s a lot lost in the translation, but it’s good enough for a quick update.

Will anything survive in roughly its current form?

Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats. But “give me the 5 steps to X”? That’s a tough business that’s about to get a lot tougher.

So why am I not panicking?

A confession: part of me finds this clarifying.

I never got into writing because of unit economics. I got into it because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know—two or three years of someone’s life, compressed into something you can hold. Books changed my life long before I wrote one, and the books that mattered most to me were never huge bestsellers.

I promised counter-arguments earlier, so here is one:

For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories (e.g., The Harajuku Moment in The 4-Hour Body) that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.

The viral sensation of ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. But well before that, in 2010, The 4-Hour Body was first published. It clocked in at 608 pages and hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Millions ultimately bought it, but a lot of my smart friends texted me some version of this: “I love you, but I’m too busy to read that monster. Could you send me a handful of quick bullets for losing 20 pounds?”

Some of them were pre-diabetic, about to get married, or had some other reason to take this seriously. How many acted upon the bullet points I sent?

Precisely zero—none of them—implemented the advice. In contrast, thousands of readers—who were led along a carefully designed path—lost 100+ pounds (see some before-and-after photos here) after failing other diets their entire lives.

Why? There’s still plenty of magic in meticulously planned journeys and real stories from real people.

So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now:

I’d rather write books for 10,000 people than make short-form video clips for 10,000,000.

Adding a little more, I’d say:

I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.

Why?

For one thing, quite a few of my podcast video clips have gotten 50-100 million views, or 50k likes, or choose-your-vanity-metric, but guess how that’s translated to downloads of the full episodes, where the important nuance is? Precisely zero. You literally cannot see the impact on a graph. The platforms are increasingly better at keeping users captive on their platforms, and algorithm chasing is a race to the bottom.

Second, the market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I’d bet on it. In a way, we’re reverting to the earlier days of the Internet.

The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.

The question for every writer, podcaster, and creator isn’t whether the interface shift comes for your format. It’s what you’ll do once it does. As always, I think it’s good to try and dig your wells before you’re dry.

So how do you do that while the sands are shifting under your feet? Perhaps it’s a return to basics:

1) 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.
2) Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
3) Success!

Could it really be that simple?

And could it really be that hard? The riptides pulling in the opposite direction are absurdly strong—algo chasing, incentives to create clickbait, bot-assisted “engagement,” and more. AI personalization will make these siren songs 100x more seductive.

But in the end – Could there really be any other choice?

I’m tying myself to the mast of long-form, but maybe I’m delusional or otherwise high on my own supply.

Only time will tell, and that time is coming soon.

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Agree? Disagree? Different angle? Please let me know in the comments here.