Talk:Self-help book

They are all rubbish

I've looked at several and they are all rubbish. Dont waste your time reading them. Study or do something more objective and factual instead. They are just garbage cranked out by publishers because people want to better themselves. ( The Prince is worth reading, but most people would not call it a self-help book. )80.2.202.35 (talk) 19:06, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Um. Look up 'encyclopaedia' and 'factual' in the dictionary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.144.246.134 (talk) 18:33, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Many people gain valuable knowledge from such books that are writen by some very high profile people such as Nepolian Hill. He has sold millions of his title Think and Grow rich which in turn has helped many people including myself. So much so that I was motivated enough to find a collection of well writen titles in audio www.audiomotivator.com form that could help even those that may not be able to read or suffer from reading disorders or may be blind and have a problem in finding these titles in brail. I have a reading disorder so i can speak from experiance. Providing the matirial is well written and well spoken they are a massive benefit to those less fortunate than others. (Tuxeedo1 (talk) 22:17, 27 January 2009 (UTC))

last line

"You can purchase Self help books from many online book sites" should be removed. If you disagree, it should at least be changed to "self help books can be purchased from online book sites" Kanjo Kotr (talk) 14:25, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

More Facts should be listed in this section: Behind the self-help book explosion

In the PsyBlog-Understand Your Mind , Dr. Jeremy Dean states that "the dark side of hope is that claims about potential improvement can, and are, grossly exaggerated, in order to prise open our wallets. Similarly a bright and breezy approach to potential change may lead us to believe that changing ourselves is easy, when often it requires considerable, sometimes monumental, effort".

This should be added because it explains the topic of this section in a simplified way. Maresha4 (talk) 07:00, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

References

Characteristics

Self-help books may act as a placebo and thus appear to be an effective way to change an individual's way of thinking about their life and selves. This is even hinted by the title of Dr. Joe Dispenza's self-help book You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter. This section should be added in order to inform those interested in self-help books that this placebo effect is the psychology behind it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cellison7 (talk • contribs) 03:04, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Advice literature

Idk, whether 'Advice literature' deserves independent article or to expand present article it self is better as of now parking a useful ref here.

• The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature By Blum, Beth. New York

Columbia University Press 2020 xiv + 329 pp.

Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 15:12, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Kefka Palazzo

In Final Fantasy VI, Kefka, the main antagonist of the game and an open nihilist, famously refers to the game’s 12 protagonists as sounding “like lines from a self-help book” after they try to tell Kefka that there is value in life. He scorns them and proceeds with his attempt to destroy the world. This should be added to the section regarding “fictional analogues”. 66.182.226.22 (talk) 13:23, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

The 'behind' section

In an effort to create a more encyclopedic tone, I've rewritten much of the intro and first two sections of this article. Of the final two sections, it seems that 'Behind the self-help book explosion' needs re-writing the most. I also think that this section could be removed and, if so, the article itself would have lost the vast majority of the personal tone that caused the personal-reflection-tag to be placed. Does anyone have any thoughts on this section? Should it be re-written or just scrapped to save the overall tone of the prose, such as it is? Ryan shell (talk) 02:39, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Given that it's been about two weeks, I'm going to remove the 'behind the self help' section. The removal of these paragraphs will result in an article that is probably 50 or 60% rewritten material, and so I'll also be removing the maintenance tag as well.Ryan shell (talk) 03:18, 25 November 2025 (UTC)