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.”