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:
| Year | Year-Over-Year |
| 2022 | baseline |
| 2023 | -5% |
| 2024 | -13% |
| 2025 | -46% |
| 2026 (run-rate) | -57% vs. 2025 |
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 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.
***
Agree? Disagree? Different angle? Please let me know in the comments here.
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As a huge AI user and as someone guilty of mining through your transcripts, looking for keywords, I’ve discovered I’m not looking for information anymore. I’m looking for guidance from someone who has been there.
The stories that are shared are not just qualitative data. they speak to the heart and the emotions . I hate AI images because there is no soul. There’s no imperfection. There is nothing to relate to.
If authors actually revealed themselves like you have done and like you keep doing, hopefully with a memoir, you will have no problem keeping our attention.
I’ve also discovered I’m desperately hungry not for more information, or validation but for the connection that comes from being impacted (and making an impact.) If authors also find more ways to create community like you encourage that is also a huge benefit AI hasn’t yet yet to replace, all so much more than just providing information.
Thanks, Tim. Really illuminating. Wondering how it’s going to affect me and what I offer and teach.
For over 20 years, I’ve taught women how to give great head (and their boyfriends thank me).*
[Insert joke about burying the lead here.]
I also offer coaching in sexuality, intimacy, relationships and communication. I have one-on-one clients, teach small online group classes, and because all my AMAs are full of people who choose not to have their cameras on as they listen, I’ve been working on a digital course offering for people who want to be “discreet“ and who want to work in the privacy of their own home, on their own time.
I’m curious what path forward I should take with my content, and how the guardrails around adult, sexual, or intimate content will affect me and my offerings in the face of these rapid changes.
* You may recognize that line as the title from the 2022 personals essay I wrote for Huffpost, which ended up being the most-visited page on their site for an entire day, and the top personals essay that year: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-give-a-blow-job_n_62cf55c7e4b02074ac91e1bc
1000 true fans works for me — my mortgage is paid. Those with mortgages need what you once had.
Sounds like you’re summing up the adage “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.”
Thank you, Tim.
Your observations are always nothing short of profound.
In my business, colleagues are quite consumed with sponsored ads, getting massive amounts of good reviews to bring you higher up on the google ladder to the first page summit and all of the other SEO tips and tricks.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of my success has been from the human interaction and delivering exceptional results for my “1000 true fans”.
You consistently give this to your readers, Tim, and it will sustain no matter how the medium or format changes!
Gary Cash DDS
[Moderator: Graphic redacted.]
Tim, I have been reading your books and listening to your podcast from the start, and I agree with you. Keep doing what you are doing! I get value from your books, your podcast, and your newsletter, which I read every week. I have thought about reaching out to you many times over the years for different reasons, but I have not. I just want to say thank you! Joe Delgado
Tim, I have three of your books permanently on my bookshelf–Tribe, Mentors and Chef. These are marked up and pages tagged with sticky notes,etc. I have listened to many of your podcasts and read Five Bullet Fridays–but your books are really what I treasure the most. Why? Because it is the YOU in all of what you produce–your experience, foibles, triumphs and disappointments, how YOU approach the subject, interviewee, problem. Ai will never have your soul. And, for the record, I am way, way NOT in your reader demographic as a 75+ female. I found you when my life was in a key transition and your books taught me how to navigate the terrain. Thank you!
Thanks for the great article.
A few questions pop to mind:
* what’s stopping ai from adjusting to long form, with better personalised nuance for more effective story telling suited to the individual?
* are we dinosaurs? Do the youth of today, raised on short, or even micro, form think like we do? Do they need long form to learn? Are we crying about a loss that the next generation doesn’t care about?
* as someone who considers themselves high agency, has information summarised and curated by ai just for me made me more or less effective? Take more or less action? Or am I the same (perhaps a little more deluded into thinking I have more of the answers than before)?
Similar to most short form content, skimming the top and quick fixes don’t really stick for me. Deeper research and commitment is required for real change. But there’s no doubt that ai is being used to cut fluff (sometimes at the expense of the journey) and is accelerating my personal progress at a rate I’ve never experienced before.
Either way, we still need great minds with unique experiences and views to introduce us to new ways of thinking. Ai will need the source content to give us these summaries… We / ai will need to find a way to reward those creators or we risk losing them.
(And can a true creator ever stop, even knowing that their work will be plagiarised the second it hits digital?)
Right again Tim – I’m betting on you – you’re my huckleberry and I ain’t going anywhere… My wife sent me this image today and in a strange way, i think it aligns with your message. Stay gold! CW
I’m worried what this means for authors, or more precisely, aspiring authors. While I know Tim has always preached that one reason for writing a book is because you can’t live with out getting the information out of you … I imagine many authors consider the financial aspects. If there is less financial incentive, will there be less well-thought-out, professional content in our future? Without new, evolving, high level content to pull from I believe AI, and we as its users, are going to suffer.
If LLMs are essentially the average of the internet, we need ways to continually raise the ceiling to get better.
And lest we forget, Socrates expressed a deep concern about the rise of reading and writing and the deleterious effects it would have on society…Thankfully, the “technology” pushed forward, and it became the bedrock of knowledge. Just another evolutionary step.
Hey Tim,
This is something I think about because I write a newsletter. I am aware of the competing content people face everyday, and know it’s a hard sell to ask someone to read one more thing, even if it is something I believe will impact someone’s life.
I would say I am choosier about what podcast I listen to or book I read because there is so much content out there. But I did read the 4- Hour Workweek last year. When I do read, I appreciate hearing from a human that shares real experiences and food for thought. So even though it’s harder to sell a book or a podcast, I appreciate the ones that I have chosen to invest in. In some ways, those books feel more real than texting a friend who’s only half paying attention as they text back.
I think, while AI bots have a good grasp of general specialized knowledge, it would be amazing down the line to interact with an AI that’s tuned to your experiences and expertise and understands the nuances of your mental processes. Which I think there’s money to be made for you when presented properly. Not to say that it’s going to replace an actual in person talk, or even reading a physical book, but it might be a good interaction layer to monetize. There’s always pros and cons but that’s maybe one of many potential pivots.
All well said. I happen to think that AI is just one side of the equation. As an avid reader of nonfiction, I also believe that many of us are suffering from “bestseller fatigue.” We purchase good books when we hear about them on podcasts, only to put them on our bookshelves for a good day to read.
FOMO is part of the story, but so are a jazzy economy, a newborn baby, and all sorts of polycrises. Most of us simply miscalculate the time available for reading while dealing with all sorts of things in life. We are getting too busy.
I think people are getting wiser and more selective, while saving an extra 20 bucks along the way to prepare for future uncertainty. This is certainly true in my case.
Another thing is that most podcasts by bestseller authors may actually provide more updated information than their own books published two to five years ago, which is a colossal time gap considering how fast everything is moving today.
Love this. Practical, real. Transformation doesn’t come in sound bites. I neither want nor need transformation very often but I will pay for it when I do.
Interesting correlation. It appears strong, but I’m less convinced of causality.
What was driving sales of your books prior to 2023? If sales were predictable, how were new readers discovering and buying them? My assumption is that your podcast served as a discovery engine, creating a flywheel in which listeners became readers. If podcast consumption, discoverability, or audience behavior shifted, that could explain at least part of the decline.
Personally, I rarely use LLMs to summarize self-help books. However, I have watched several YouTube summaries of The 4-Hour Body that gave me the key ideas without reading the book. YouTube’s recommendation engine is incredibly powerful. If I’m engaged with a topic or a person, it automatically serves related content from across the platform. There are also podcast advertisers bidding on your name, so someone searching for Tim Ferriss may end up discovering entirely different creators. That ecosystem competes for attention in ways that didn’t exist before.
I also wonder whether we’re trying to explain the trend or solve it. People learn differently. Reading a book is not the preferred format for everyone. I read, but I also learn a great deal from listening to conversations, which is why I consume podcasts. One frustration I’ve always had is the lack of tools that help connect ideas across podcasts and conversations over time. I actually tried building something in this space and failed, though that’s a much longer story.
Generational preferences matter too. Attention spans, content formats, and learning habits continue to evolve. Personally, I enjoy short-form self-help content when it provides practical value. For example, I’ve built a swipe file of short lifting videos organized by muscle group and used it to design my own workout program.
For what it’s worth, I’d absolutely consume Tim Ferriss short-form content. It seems like a powerful way to stay relevant, reach younger audiences, and create an entry point into deeper work.
And as a final thought: I started building an app inspired by your content. I haven’t gotten very far, but with the beautiful content, legacy, trust, and the brand you have built, the whole world is your canvas. You just have to choose the colors and maybe even color outside the lines. 🙂
This has also happened in the world of commercial photography. A very steady income and 30 year career in NYC shooting for top brands has basically fallen off a cliff in 2025 and 2026, and now there are numerous apps that will provide images for your ad campaigns using AI, at little cost to no cost.
Thanks Tim, as always you are the ever-surviving canary in coalmine of life for many. Funny I got to the post from the YouTube feed. Whenever you write something there, I know I must read it.
I disagree. Yes, LLMs might be part of the picture. But there is another big factor that is not considered at all in your article.
The cost of living crisis. People of all income levels are struggling financially because the cost of living rose significantly since Covid. As everyone bugeted for a mortgage they could afford, a sudden increase in cost of living (food, insurances, utilities) is hitting all income levels.
Not having enough money does not only mean eating ramen noudles. People are freaking out, have anxiety, get depressed, they are loosing their jobs, fighting with their spouses over money etc.
So the self help category “How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle?” is just not speaking to the reality and the problems people are facing right now.
Wealth is accumulated at the top, while working families are searching through the couch for 50cents to buy their kid lunch.
This comes at a beautiful moment in my own journey. The 1000 true fans concept originally inspired me to create a Patreon in 2014…which at one point was one of the top 100 music pages on the site.
But I lost sight of that, in all the heat of an exploding life. Of burnout. Depression. Recovery. Marriage. And all the rest.
But recently I’ve been realigning. And reading your simple reminder of 1000 true fans aligns perfectly with where I’m at right now. Thank you.
Always appreciate your depth, authenticity, and guidance, Tim. From one of countless who are grateful for your ongoing sharing.
PS: I’m sure I heard somewhere that you might be thinking of becoming a dad. I’m just over a year into fatherhood with my daughter Honey. HIGHLY recommend 🫂
I can only give my perspective, but I’m drawn by personality-driven content. That’s why I listen to your content – because on top of the information you share, I’m drawn to you as a creator over others. Same goes for other creators like the Craig Mods, Kevin Kellys, Paul Millerds, Shaan Puri/Sam Parr’s of the world. I’ll read their newsletters/listen to the full episodes because I simply enjoy the info they share intertwined with the personality delivering it.
GPT/Claude/Gemini are great tools for getting quick facts. But I personally never see a world where someone like me chooses solely that over the content creators I follow and purchasing their books. The experience I get consuming content on an LLM is vastly different than through a creator I appreciate reading/listening to. The former being more cold…utilitarian in nature…and the latter being simply a more enjoyable experience as I learn whatever information is being shared alongside real, interesting stories and anecdotes.
Just my 2 cents.
Malcolm Gladwell’s, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” tells the story of the Brer Rabbit, one of the ultimate trickster archetypes of African American history, who wins through mischief and wit. You have the same nothing-to-lose attitude that can grow 10,000 True Fans to 20,000, even while social media followers literally drop. Revising Gladwell’s philosophies helped me set new sales records this year with old sales avenues: in-person events and my email list. My short-form videos got two billion views in 2024, and earned slightly over $100k in monetization, but did not help grow my True Fans. They grew when I focused on timeless principles, empathy, connection and service.
I’m concerned that depth is gone. I see among many, who were maybe not the PhDs or academics in my group, a complete collapse in reading. The people who stopped buying or being exposed to your and other books/news are simply getting coddled perspectives from AI, challenging if so prompted, but likely not.
Struggling with knowledge and sitting with the journey is the human condition. When the 50th rehash of the same old ChatGPT inquiry about how to solve your problems forces you to maybe introspect, we’ll start the journey back to ourselves and our own journey, not just a thoughtless extraction from the training data. I anticipate only those who really accept this and keep their ears open will benefit. Many will atrophy in attention and intelligence, more or less incapable of discernment.
I hope others with narrower and less diversified businesses are able to find a path. I hope people still do the hard things for their own sake.
Agree with a caveat – books and conversations force people to ask different or unexpected questions. ChatGPT will summarize a weekly exercise plan but won’t include sleep or macronutrient information unless it’s specifically requested. From a financial planning perspective, asking questions that tap into the emotional side of money can be more powerful than a budget spreadsheet or automated investment recommendations. I believe the long form Podcast and Book will continue to help people ask unexpected questions with impact. Great article, Tim!
Chase this trend to the end and it could have an interesting effect on the AI systems themselves. If people stop producing as much content, AI has less and less material to answer from for that future problem someone is trying to solve. Also maybe people adapt. Some publishers go paper only out of spite. Really out there is creating an Internet that doesn’t allow AI to look at it. Perhaps laws come into play or Internet standards update with an HTML tag that flags standards abiding AI from scanning. Copyright gets better protections allowing for takedown data scrubbing orders against AI databases.
The current landscape is very challenging though. Thanks for the insight.
Hi Tim, thank you for your thoughts and transparency with your data. One of the reasons I read your books and listen to your podcast is because they feel genuine and authentic (cf. Naval). Of course techniques and advice presented are useful. But there’s something refreshing with your content and guests that I still haven’t found with LLMs. I hope I’m not missing the point with this comment! Thanks for you work, it’s very inspiring! Benjamin
I agree with your analysis, your data is showing up in many places. As a former bookseller our core business was always “how-to” books in every subject from cooking to business to self-help. I’m happy to see Seth Godin commenting here, his advice to find your smallest viable market and focus on that resonates even more with the advent of AI slop.
Always posting your blogs at the perfect time, Tim! I’ve been pondering this questions recently as I love personal development and would love to find a way to do it full time.
This makes me feel a little more sane. I saw the same sharp drop just as 2025 began. I’ve also had viral reels that don’t do a thing.
I’ve always aspired to write narrative, original-concept fiction with “the information” baked-in, so I don’t expect to be replaced, but am having to re-think what the addressable audience is for future books. I’d rather get meatier and weirder than try to play an arms race against the magical knowledge-averaging machine.
Dear Tim,
I am older in my 70s but am a fan of yours as I love your curiosity about how people tick. I am easily overwhelmed so have chosen to not have Facebook, X, instagram and AI so I can focus on what matters. I think focusing on your 1000 is what makes sense and will keep us human with all our warts.
Thanks for great article and your podcasts.
All the best.
Lucille
Hi Tim,
I wonder if it would be a good move at this point is to start repositioning books like The 4-Hour Workweek as influental classics.
AI is getting incredibly good at generating “here’s the system for achieving X” content on demand. What it can’t do is give a book historical significance.
I feel like the significant reason to read 4HWW today may be less about the tactics and more about seeing how it anticipated so many of the ideas that later became mainstream.
That way, AI stops being a competitor to the book and becomes more of a backdrop to it.
tradeoffs? maybe we are going back to how socrates wanted education which was a conversation form only and not books? also I wonder if you would stick to the long form if you were starting today from $0?
Trying to look beyond the horizon is always a fun game to play. Keep playing and we will both see what is next soon enough. Prepare and be ready is all we can really do.
I have read more than my share of self help books.
To be honest, there is hardly any nee information coming up in the last 2-3 years.
And, a book that contains only say 80-100 pages of readable stuff, is now unnecessarily bloated to 200-250 pages. So, better to go to AI. Personally, i have stopped reading self help this year (read about 40 in the last4-5 years) and reading history books this year.
Hi, Tim-
I’m going to join the other folks here who have commented on the distinction between information and use of information putting it slightly differently, the numbers you quoted about your dropping sales. I’m merely the denominator. I don’t think you ever knew the true numerator: the number of people who are actually implementing what they read in your books, or even if they did really read them. Those “tire kickers“ are no longer buying your books. That suggested those who are buying your books (other than demographic differences, such as perhaps older folks and workforce buying books) are those who truly intend to use the content in them. To my mind, that suggests consideration of opening up some kind of paid membership. I’m thinking something similar to the 1000 true fans idea you mentioned. Wishing you the highest and best.
Doug.
Tim, have long appreciated your info and approach to learning /separating wheat from chaff. I’m reminded of a quote from a well-lnown sales/communications trainer: ” If sales (I would add coaching/learning too) was just about transferring information from one person to another, we would have replaced people long ago with brochures/videos/e-mails etc”. Yet we have not ! We buy from people, we learn from people. Information is part of it obviously but only an ingredient in the recipe. Best wishes
Maybe 50% of the people who bought books never read them, just put them on the shelf. These same people stopped buying books, they turned to AI for short answers. In any case, before the era of AI and now they just don’t get results. What do you think?
Tim, I couldn’t agree more. I have been writing about this myself, most recently in my column on Forbes called “The Town Square Is Gone — And Entrepreneurs Are Paying The Price” (sorry, not promoting, just adding for reference).
Without a shared canon of wisdom, we have no collective values and people are making decisions in a vacuum. The technology that was supposed to unite us atomized us instead.
In my writing, I’m not too far from your prescription to find your 1000 fans. But in the case of entrepreneurs trying to navigate uncertainty, I recommend finding 10 others to travel with. Not to perform success AT each other but to share success and failure WITH each other. The town square isn’t coming back but each of us can find 10 others who we want to share the journey with.
interesting read and the reflection on prescriptive non-fiction is a curious one. long-form or any other approach for its own sake implies that there’s a clear formula for moving forward. there may or may not be, and all this is yet to be determined.
ironically, in my anecdotal case, i’ve noticed a shift in interest post-ai. i can’t know for sure what the reasons for this uptick are.
two things seem to resonate though, besides the 1k fans bit: 1) that my approach to philosophy is not prescriptive, in fact it poses more questions than it gives answers. 2) i’ve been complementing that with in-person activities.
these are still at the trial-run and testing phases, but some people are seeking conversations and meetups that go beyond the how-tos. most importantly, they’re seeking different perspectives, outside their usual circles.
i could indeed say that i’m tying myself to the philosophy mast, which i’ve in fact been doing for many years now. but even that has changed though out this time, because i’ve shifted from pure courses, to workshop format, to something that’s a mix of discussions, facilitation, and stuff like that.
so if you’re tying yourself to the long-form mast, one question would be: what can one offer the reader, and in what way can they invite them into the conversation, rather than give them ready-made formulas?
Self-Help & Personal Transformation: the attached chart shows the monthly development of new book supply, from c. 350 new English-language Kindle titles per month before ChatGPT to more than 8,000 new titles per month in June 2026.
But I don’t think AI killed nonfiction. The decline began much earlier, at the start of the pandemic, when TikTok and short-form video were simultaneously spreading across virtually every platform.
Knowledge consumption has shifted heavily toward short videos, YouTube, and, to some extent, online communities such as Skool and Circle.
Very few people still read nonfiction ebooks. On top of that, almost any question can now be posed directly to an LLM.
There was a brief uptick, likely caused by technical or algorithmic factors. But the January-to-June 2026 trend on the far right already suggests that it was temporary.
I too would rather write books for 10,000 that I can help. Thanks for the perspective.
I believe we have other points to consider:
LLMs don’t have the capacity to confront and push us. The capacity to provoke the spark that starts something. There’s something in 4-Hour Body that motivates you to take action and do a low-carb diet, for example. AI still doesn’t occupy that place (the condescending “you’re great” approach doesn’t count) and I don’t think it should or will occupy it.
AI is making the low-tolerance-for-dense-content scenario worse among younger generations. AI summaries are equivalent to a short-short-video in terms of information volume. The 1000 fans might actually be the 1000 who still consume dense content and critique the information they receive.
I seldom use ChatGPT, but when I do it is to get information that would take me hours or days to research and find rather than get it in seconds or minutes. I still want to watch or read videos and articles, because there will always be some helpful information that you just cannot get in a summary.
I agree 100%! I write long form linkedin posts and they don’t get me “likes,” but they do bring in new followers and profile views even if the impressions are less. It’s high time to build a community and that’s exactly what I’m chasing.
Whoa, hold on there. My favorite saying is, “it ain’t necessarily so.” In this era polluted with every pathological “influencer”, grifter, “transparent” somebody with something to sell ya, that saying could never be more apt. In my case, as a serial personal development junkie going back decades and decades and decades to my teen years, something AI has never and will never be able to replace is my accumulated knowledge. This reality exactly parallels the conversation currently happening in technology regarding junior engineers losing experience opportunities. Without knowledge from accumulated experience, junior engineers will never be able to fully optimize their output–they simply lack the judgment. You see, AI can churn out lots of personal development “advice”, which has indeed become a commodity, but the human must still use *taste, judgement, and curation* to apply that advice to their particular situation and context. Caveat: I am a maniac Claude user, *but* based on decades and decades of reading probably hundreds of thousands of “self-help” books (yours, too, Tim :)), I am able to optimize whatever advice Claude conjures up on these years accumulated knowledge. My *advice* to those thinking of dropping the reading of books: don’t. please don’t. Read more. Read faster (10x faster). Read better. Read more powerfully. Remember the rule of reading: 20% of books is the meat, the other 80% is just the author justifying the price and reiterating his point. Those that don’t read are in danger of ingesting every bag of blue pills the pusher from the Matrix is selling. And the pusher has gone hyperbolic in the age of AI. Your *edge* will always be your own accumulated knowledge base, and that can never come from just taking the “advice” of AI.
That’s the missing piece I was looking for, and I found it here. Thank you!
I develop a night dream analyzer app, which is built on the process-oriented psychology method which I have studied and hold a diploma. So I was at a crossroads if I should go the tiktok path (which I hate) or stay true to the transformative core of the app. Well, that’s what the ChatGPT or Tiktoks can’t take away: the transformation. Now I got it
Some forms of human communication of one to many don’t summarize and condense easily, and will be hard to disintermediate. Songs, poems, paintings, plays, movies, basically performed art. Information transfer, however …