Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future
My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago. Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let's state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are convenient for getting answers quickly. My team and I use Claude and other tools daily. But far fewer people have first-hand experience with the speed and intensity of disruption that's happening. Not in a year, not in six months, but right now.
So let me show you, using my own books as the cadaver on the table, what a fatality looks like.
First, some broader stats
For the first three months of 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that "adult nonfiction" was down 9% from Q1 2025. Self-help had the steepest subcategory decline, with units down 26.3% year-over-year. Only two of 16 subcategories—crafts/hobbies/antiques/games and religion—grew at all (9.6% and 1.6%, respectively).
My personal sales numbers
Below are the domestic print numbers (BookScan) for my five books—The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors—as a portfolio. Keep in mind that all of these were #1 NYT and/or WSJ bestsellers, and The 4-Hour Workweek was one of the most highlighted books across all of Amazon in 2017, a full decade after publication.
| Year | Year-Over-Year |
|---|---|
| 2022 | baseline |
| 2023 | -5% |
| 2024 | -13% |
| 2025 | -46% |
| 2026 (run-rate) | -57% vs. 2025 |
ChatGPT, powered by the updated GPT-3.5 model, launched on November 30, 2022. There was a gentle -5% slip in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use.
But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.
Many of the strongest self-help franchises on the planet are also getting hammered. These are the best performers. You see them on endcaps everywhere books are sold. But if you look at BookScan sales for 2025 vs 2026 thus far, the biggest names I could think of will be down ~40–60%.
My agent, who has decades of statements to compare against, put it bluntly: 2025 was the first big drop, 2026 looks more severe, and the only thing that's really changed in that timeframe is the acceleration of AI.
What's actually going on?
Think about what my books are, functionally speaking. On some level, The 4-Hour Body is a lookup table. I have described a lot of my books as Choose Your Own Adventure-style menus: How do I lose fat? How do I fix my sleep? How do I quickly add 10 pounds of muscle? Similarly, The 4-Hour Workweek is a decision tree for designing your lifestyle and automating your income.
In 2019, the best interface to those answers was a book.
In 2026, millions believe that the best interface is a free chatbot that has read my books—and thousands of others—that will give you a personalized protocol in 15 seconds, adjusted for your bodyweight, your schedule, your injuries, and your aversion to cottage cheese.
Is prescriptive nonfiction the canary in the coal mine?
If "how-to" books are getting crushed because LLMs seem to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized advice… What's next on the chopping block?
- How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?
- Prescriptive podcasts. A huge portion of podcast listening—including a lot of my show—is mining conversations for actionable advice. If an AI can extract, summarize, and personalize the takeaways from 800+ episodes, how many people still press play?
- Online courses, newsletters, advice blogs. Same logic. Anything with a core value proposition of "transferring instructions from my head to yours" is now competing with an interface that does it instantly, conversationally, and for free.
My position—and I'd genuinely love to be wrong—is yes, prescriptive nonfiction is the canary in the coal mine, and the coal mine is enormous. I believe LLMs become the interface to everything: search and purchasing, obviously, but also surfing video, summarizing podcasts, navigating courses, even browsing books. The original content doesn't exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.
So why am I not panicking?
A confession: part of me finds this clarifying. I never got into writing because of unit economics. I got into it because a book is the highest-density transfer of obsession I know—two or three years of someone's life, compressed into something you can hold. Books changed my life long before I wrote one, and the books that mattered most to me were never huge bestsellers.
For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.
The viral sensation of ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. But well before that, in 2010, The 4-Hour Body was first published. It clocked in at 608 pages and hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Millions ultimately bought it, but a lot of my smart friends texted me some version of this: "I love you, but I'm too busy to read that monster. Could you send me a handful of quick bullets for losing 20 pounds?"
Some of them were pre-diabetic, about to get married, or had some other reason to take this seriously. How many acted upon the bullet points I sent?
Precisely zero—none of them—implemented the advice. In contrast, thousands of readers—who were led along a carefully designed path—lost 100+ pounds after failing other diets their entire lives.
Why? There's still plenty of magic in meticulously planned journeys and real stories from real people.
So here's where I've landed, at least for now: I'd rather write books for 10,000 people than make short-form video clips for 10,000,000.
Adding a little more, I'd say: I'd rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.
The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting. I'd bet on it.
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.
The question for every writer, podcaster, and creator isn't whether the interface shift comes for your format. It's what you'll do once it does.
1) Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it's time to revisit. 2) Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again. 3) Success!