As a reader just pointed out to me, Crown’s online excerpt for Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless includes several of author Steve Salerno’s most spirit-deflating experiences at Rodale, the publisher behind The South Beach Diet.
Below, Salerno explains why most self-help publishers find the idea of being helpful impractical.
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One piece of information to emerge from those market surveys stood out above all others and guided our entire approach: The most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months. In a way that finding should not have surprised me. People read what interests them; a devoted Civil War buff is going to buy every hot new book that comes out on the Civil War. Pet lovers read endlessly about pets.
But the Eighteen-Month Rule struck me as counterintuitive-and discomfiting-in a self-help setting. Here, the topic was not the Civil War or shih tzus; the topic was showing people “how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better.” Many of our books proposed to solve, or at least ameliorate, a problem. If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us–at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again. At some point, people would make the suggested changes, and those changes would “take.” I discovered that my cynicism was even built into the Rodale system, in the concept of repurposing-reusing chunks of our copyrighted material in product after product under different names, sometimes even by different authors.
Worse yet, our marketing meetings made clear that we counted on our faithful core of malcontents. (Another important lesson in self-help theology: SHAM’s answer when its methods fail? You need more of it. You always need more of it.) One of my Rodale mentors illustrated the concept by citing our then all-time best-selling book, Sex: A Man’s Guide. This individual theorized that the primary audience for Man’s Guide did not consist of accomplished Casanovas determined to polish their already enviable bedroom skills. Our buyers were more likely to be losers at love-hapless fumblers for whom our books conjured a fantasy world in which they could imagine themselves as ladies’ men, smoothly making use of the romantic approaches and sexual techniques we described. Failure and stagnation, thus, were central to our ongoing business model.
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Previously on GC: Notable & Upcoming Self-Help Titles