Helping Those Who Help Themselves

Baby-care books, home-maintenance books, mental-health books, books on medical maladies, fitness books, financial advice, secrets of sports professionals, beauty advice, nutritional wisdom: The list is almost too vast to contemplate. Those who track the publishing industry are unable to say just how many self-help books are published, or consumed, each year. The answer is, millions and millions and millions and millions.

“I wish I had a figure for you,” Fred Hills, vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster, said, “but I will say that it is the most reliable market in nonfiction publishing, and by and large it sells better in hardcover than it does in trade paper.” Hills has been the editor for a number of best-selling authors in this genre, including M. Scott (“The Road Less Taken”) Peck; Jane Fonda, Charles (“Wealth Without Risk”); Givens and Robert (“Nothing Down”) Allen.

Shad Helmstetter, an author whose success in this genre has earned him the moniker of “the Dale Carnegie of the ‘90s,” says that in the late ‘70s, he sat down to write “the ultimate self-help book.” To do this, he studied “every self-help book there was, to find the thread” that held them together. His methodology clearly worked, for Helmstetter has sold many, many millions of books.

His experience in the fields of self-help books and seminars has convinced him that “you can talk to the average individual and that individual either reads these books, or listens to tapes, or goes to a seminar, or knows someone who does.”

In the past, as the field has proliferated, self-help books have tended to extend all over the literary map. But recently, many in publishing have begun to see a change in the market, as self-help titles become more specialized and considerably more specific.

“There used to be far more general books; for example, all the psychology books,” Rena Wolner, a special consultant to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, said. “Now you are dealing with a much more specialized market.”

“We don’t get into the vague, touchy-feely books,” said John Duff, director of what is known at Doubleday as “special interest” publishing.

“I like to call these books prescriptive books--that is, they answer in the affirmative the question: ‘Can this book help me?’ ”

The titles, Duff agreed, have grown progressively more specialized. Rather than a book on overall health, today’s medical self-help book will probably focus on the back, the neck, the elbow or the upper gastrointestinal tract. Often, the books will have a time limit associated with them, as in Simon & Schuster’s forthcoming “Seven Weeks to a Settled Stomach,” or “32 Days to a 32-Inch Waist,” a book from Taylor Publishing that pledges, “Your days as a Greek god don’t have to be over!”

“The idea in the field of self-help books today is to make a promise and then to deliver,” Wolner said. “The promise these days has become more and more sophisticated, and more and more specific.”

Along those lines, Duff said, any “made simple” book, any book that promises to make a complex subject understandable, is likely to do well.

This narrowing of focus may be attributed, Hills said, to the very proliferation of the market over the years, as well as to increased attention to the same topics in other media, such as mainstream magazines.

“Your broad-gauge, once-over-lightly book tends not to do as well because you have already read all that,” Hills said.

This same level of sophistication among readers of self-help books apparently has conspired to help suffocate the kind of generic humanism that romped through bookstores in the ‘70s.

“Although to some degree it is still in there, the guise of ‘new age’ tends right now to be the kiss of death in bookstores,” Hills said. “It has come to denote a certain degree of mindlessness and unsaleability.”

The market for these books, too, is marked by a new kind of voracity. Mindful of the fact that only a comparative handful of Americans--somewhere between 5 and 15% of the populace--frequent bookstores and buy large quantities of books, it has to be said that those who buy these self-help books tend to buy them in quantity. A newly pregnant woman buys nine books on pregnancy, then four more on breast-feeding. By the time the baby comes, she has probably bought and read another dozen on what to do with the child in his or her first six weeks of life.

“I was standing in line at a bookstore here in Manhattan,” Duff recalled, “and the woman in front of me had her arms completely full of dog books. Piles and piles of dog books. There must have been at least 10 books.

“It’s that kind of mentality,” Duff said, “that kind of appetite, the feeling that ‘I have to have every detail.’ ”

So the final decade of the 20th Century may well see readers turning into advice junkies. Readers may, as Helmstetter predicts, “develop little libraries on subjects that are important to us.” And whether all this enlightenment--this self-help--will really help remains to be seen.