Want to pick up seven habits to become highly effective? Win friends and influence people? OK, 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 (2007) — GenAI is killing the how-to publishing industry.
Last week 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 ten 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”.