Tim Ferriss, the author of self-help classics such as The Four Hour Work Week, noted a very sharp drop in his book sales since the arrival of AI back in late 2022. He viewed this as a real turning point for the ‘self-help’ genre of writing. He asked, ‘Has AI already killed nonfiction?’ and concluded:

“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.” – Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?

The solution? He suggested the way forward is to return to the 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!

I don’t know that the work of Tim Ferriss is a clear bellwether for the entire genre. He’s a unicorn and there will always be a few of those. My feeling is that the industry ran a little ahead of itself in treating self-help books as stand-alone products in their own right. I always saw them as derivative, secondary products. The books were never the main event. The main event was always none other than the author. People want a direct connection with a real expert who has actually been successful at the exact thing they’re writing about – or at least knowledgeable. The gold standard, the most desirable activity, would be a personal audience with that expert. Failing that, they want to meet the expert in some kind of face-to-face encounter of learning, exchange or connection. And only then does the book become an item of value. The book is always a proxy for the personalised encounter; it’s not really the primary expression of the encounter itself. The book is a kind of souvenir of the experience, which works, curiously enough, even if you didn’t actually take part in the face-to-face version.

I’m not saying anything new here. It’s obvious that people prefer the expert – not least in the amount of money people are prepared to pay for face-to-face encounters compared with a book of the same thing. Take popular psychology, as just one possible example. You might pay a psychologist $150 or more per 50-minute session, and you might even book numerous sessions, whereas you’ll only pay $10-30 for the psychologist’s book. The book is a real bargain, but you don’t care: what you really want is the real thing. For a live audience with a world famous therapist you might be prepared to pay ten times the going rate, or more. A similar dynamic is at work well beyond the subject of popular psychology: if you liked the book, you’ll love the live event.

And a similar value gradient is evident well beyond the prescriptive non-fiction genre. It seems to hold for writing more generally. The Sydney Writers’ Festival, for example, a week of live events with authors, had its most successful year ever in 2026, as measured by ticket sales and attendance figures. Just across the Tasman Sea, the Aukland Writers’ Festival also had its most successful year in 2026.

Then too, the annual Hay Festival in Wales had a very successful 2026, with 210,000 tickets issued and book sales up 35%.

At the last minute the Adelaide Book Week suddenly collapsed due to arguments about disinviting a writer over Israel-Palestine views. That was unfortunate, but despite this massive setback, the local writing and publishing community was determined enough to set up a one-off festival in its place, even at the last minute, with nearly fifty events, many sold out.

The spread and great success of these writers’ festivals shows that people are very keen to meet face-to-face to discuss books in one another’s physical presence, and especially in the presence of their favourite authors.1 These days every medium-sized town upwards seems to have its own festival of writing. Even a small but well-formed town like Berry in New South Wales, with a population of less than two and a half thousand, has its own very well-organised Berry Writers’ Festival. Perhaps your local town does too.

This might well be hyperbole, but apparently, writers’ festivals are ’the new raves’.

It’s rather curious. Why on earth would anyone want to sit in an audience gazing for an hour or so at an author whose books they like reading, then endure a question session made from variants of “Where do you get your ideas from”? Isn’t the book itself, just reading the book, the main event here? Well, yes and no. In reading a book the reader implicitly imagines themselves in some sort of connection with its author, and to see this connection come to life is valuable in itself.

If the book isn’t a souvenir of the live encounter, just try telling that to the line of people queuing patiently for the author to sign their very own copy.

Uncategorizable (’Quixotic’) millionaire David Walsh has opened an impressive new wing of his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, to house his library, which gives pride of place to expensive signed editions of works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Isaac Asimov’s PhD thesis. Presumably the paying public will treat these signed tomes a little like they treat the original art work of great artists. They have an aura, as cultural theorist Walter Benjamin would have said.

So, what’s the future of prescriptive non-fiction? Not just to reconnect with a thousand true fans, but to do so in a very particular way: in person.

In person matters now more than ever. The rise of AI makes people question their purpose, given that machines can now ‘do it better’. There’s a kind of shame at being human.

As artist and film-maker Michael Szpakowski says:

“AI renders culture a succession of isolated and static (and largely digital) objects rather than an ongoing dynamic and historical dialogic expression of our embodied and reflecting humanity.”

The more AI subverts and destroys the very idea of human agency, the greater will be the push-back towards real, physical presence – something humans are still quite good at. We’re seeing this in many areas of culture, and we’re certainly seeing it with books and writing.

Further reading:

*I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now. *

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  1. The same claim could be made of the very popular ‘ComicCon’ events around the world. Supposedly ‘disposable’, mass-produced pop culture thrives on physical presence. ↩︎